A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. Roma E. Bryant is a member of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Ottawa, Ontario.
Against the Night. Charles Colson. Servant Publications, 1989.
“The times smell of sunset,” says Charles Colson, as he gives the reader a long look at the encroaching darkness casting shadows across our land. Students demonstrate against required reading of their Western civilization curriculum, ugly excesses often characterize political campaigning, and streams of empty rhetoric pour forth. Religion has suffered devastating blows, TV and videos have aroused the curiosity of youth to seek stimulating violence. An intern has no difficulty injecting a patient with a killing dose of morphine to “give her rest.” Compromise seems to be the name of the game, the unborn child has no protection unless the mother has a sense of responsibility. Darkness is encroaching in every area of life, politics, education, law, medicine, the arts, even our communities, churches and families.
The new barbarians are all around us, and they are not hairy Goths and Vandals; the invaders have come from within. We have bred them in our families and trained them in our classrooms. They inhabit legislatures, courts, film studios, our churches — most of them are attractive and pleasant, persuasive and subtle. Who are these barbarians? The answers are dismaying and challenging.
Before the fall of the Roman Empire the comfortable Romans of the day were as deaf to the barbarian rumblings as we are today. Their downfall did not come from without; it began with the decadence within. It is true that while we rarely learn a lesson from history, history has a strange way of repeating itself.
Colson draws a comparison between John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) who created a core of morality on self-interest. Mill believed that only individuals and their particular interests were important, and those interests could be determined by whatever maximized their pleasure and minimized their pain. That sounds strangely familiar as we hear from today’s New Agers, for whom self is exalted as the god within as Shirley MacLaine shouts “I am God” in her television special.
This is the book, sectioned into three parts, Sunset, Nightfall, and A Flame in the Night, that brings us up short and encourages us to take a long hard look at conditions that exist today in our Western society.
As he looks at “Sunset” Colson traces the roots of this barbarian invasion, exploring the intimations of decline. He takes a hard look at television and what it has done to reflect and reinforce individualism. The problem is not with being individuals; it is with the “ism.” Recognition of the individual affirms respect for human dignity and the uniqueness of each person, while individualism distorts that joy of identity into an ego cult of one.
Colson gives some prime examples of the reign of relativism. Where does moral behaviour or moral judgment have its base? Who is to do the instructing? Whose morality do we follow if each makes up his or her own? Many sensible people today demand that everyone has a right to express his or her own views — as long as those views do not contain any absolutes that would compete with the prevailing standard of relativism. For example, a Nazi would not be excluded from political debate — nor would a sado- masochist, a pedophile, a spiritualist. Their right to free expression would be vigorously defended by the same cultural elite who are so often offended when Christians express their views. “Enlightened” men and women today recognize no absolute at all, except the absolute of blind intolerance.
“Nightfall” opens with a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which says in part, “the forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive.” Decadence and decline is brought out in vivid examples of happenings in our western society. God has ordained three institutions for the ordering of society: the family for the propagation of life, the state for the preservation of life, and the church for the proclamation of the gospel. As these institutions have been assaulted and penetrated by the new barbarians the consequences are frightening.
The breakdown of the family is very frightening. When a mother is taught that she is better off without a husband, when a three-year-old is taught that she doesn’t need a father, something is wrong. Colson relates the experience of visiting a huge penitentiary on an Easter morning. In hundreds of cells eighteen and nineteen year old kids were lying in their bunks, staring at the ceiling. Few knew or cared that it was Easter; most of them were from broken families. To quote Colson: “I knew I was looking into the face of a new, lost generation. It was a chilling scene.”
Most of us are, at least, familiar with the sad commentary of what is going on in our classrooms. Each year a new generation of leaders — doctors, lawyers, politicians, MBA’s — are graduating, and for many personal advancement is the only guiding principle. Many of these end up charting the course of our nation. The halls of government and the political system as a whole are not immune to infiltration by the barbarians who use the citizens’ goodwill and support to become elected and then abuse the trust placed in them.
The pews also, are not without barbarians. Too many people who go to church can scarcely differentiate between a “cult” and a true following of the Lord Jesus Christ. Church is only good as long as it makes “me feel good.” Is this then, the great nightfall?
The flame does burn in the night, however. Colson takes us through the moral decay in the realm of politics and holds up as a strong example British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as an unusual politician who is willing to state publicly the limits of politics. In her strong address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland Margaret Thatcher states her belief that only by what she calls “the moral impulse” can the character of an increasingly secular nation be changed, not group by group, or party by party, or even church by church — but soul by soul.
To hold back the dark the moral education has to be increased, families have to be strengthened, children have to have the right role models and many parents have long ago abdicated this responsibility.
During the Dark Ages one force in medieval Europe prevented complete barbarism. This force was the church. Monks preserved not only the Scriptures but classical literature as well. They were not only busy with their prayers but in clearing land, building towns, harvesting crops. When little else shone, these religious people provided attractive models of communities of caring and character. By holding on to vestiges of civilization as faith, learning and civility, monks and nuns in England held back the night.
Even though the church today is shot through with individualism that cripples its witness and is made up of sinners, it is the one institution that has the capability to challenge culture by bearing witness to God’s standards of justice and righteousness.
The role of the church today is to stand! Colson reiterates that the church cannot model the Kingdom of God if it is conformed to the kingdoms of men. To quote C.S. Lewis: “a world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world, and might be even more difficult to save.”
Colson concludes his book with a powerful messages of hope as he quotes Minnie Louise Haskins, who was in turn quoted by King George VI in 1939: “ I said to the man who stood at the gate of the Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’ ”
Can the new barbarians be resisted? Colson’s hope is that they can, but even if they are not we must go forward in obedience, in hope, even in joy.
I urge you to read this powerful book. It is filled with a very realistic look at the “night” that is invading our lives, but gives us the important guideline if we are to stem the tide at all: obedience to God!