He blames the media for much of the damage insofar as they “see through the spectacles of a finally relativistic set of ethical personal social standards” (56). He calls out public television for refusing to broadcast Whatever Happened to the Human Race? while using tax money to deploy the Hard Choices series, which platformed a materialistic view of the universe, one that relegated biblical teachings to the realm of “fairy tales.” He also mentions PBS’s broadcast of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which touted a thoroughly mechanistic universe.

In 1981, the year Francis Schaeffer published A Christian Manifesto, I was a philosophy professor at Wheaton. He had just spoken in an April chapel, and I asked him if he’d mind coming directly to my bioethics class to engage the students. From the first time I would read his Escape from Reason (1968) up through How Should We Then Live? (1976) and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979), I had admired his willingness to take on the idols of the age, and the 1979 video series primed him for extemporaneous contribution to my class.

Though he’d been diagnosed with lymphoma in 1978 (a malady which would take his life in 1984), he was still going as strong as he could, and he was kind enough to agree to the impromptu presentation, with Edith by his side. (She was not thrilled that he would tax himself for this extra hour of speaking, but he was willing, and she relented.)

The Religion of Humanism amidst the Reach of Television

Versed in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and the two Humanist Manifestos (1933 and 1973), Schaeffer picks up the gauntlet in his Christian Manifesto, responding particularly in chapter four to these humanist documents. He also cites Supreme Court decisions to make his case that humanism is, indeed, religious. From there, he argues that the religion of humanism not only exists, but that it increasingly prevails, supplanting our nation’s Judeo-Christian consensus and greasing the skids toward authoritarianism.

He blames the media for much of the damage insofar as they “see through the spectacles of a finally relativistic set of ethical personal social standards” (56). He calls out public television for refusing to broadcast Whatever Happened to the Human Race? while using tax money to deploy the Hard Choices series, which platformed a materialistic view of the universe, one that relegated biblical teachings to the realm of “fairy tales.” He also mentions PBS’s broadcast of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which touted a thoroughly mechanistic universe.

The problem of partisan overreach extended to the legacy media, where “reporters” sought to be players—case in point, CBS, where the avuncular Walter Cronkite (who later expressed doubts over the long-term viability of democracy) was pressuring Ronald Reagan to pick Gerald Ford rather than George Bush as his running mate, a maneuver chronicled by Tom Shales in the Washington Post. Schaeffer concludes that the “solution is to limit somehow television’s power to use its bias in ‘the editorial’ reporting of events, and most specifically to keep it from shaping the political process” (61).

That observation jumps off the page, provoking the reader to ask what sort of limiting procedure he has in mind. Surely, we do not want a government watchdog such as the one established (and disestablished within a month) by the Department of Homeland Security—the Disinformation Governance Board. Critics quickly and correctly pointed out that Secretary Mayorkas’s brainchild was reminiscent of various “ministries of truth” portrayed in Orwell’s 1984 and instantiated under Axis and Iron Curtain tyrants in the twentieth century.

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