I'm fairly sure the main point was made, that extreme fundamentalism is in general a reaction to a perceived threat. My "sermon" may not have been so clear, that, however unlikely and even distasteful it might seem, we could try to understand and politely connect with people who don't share our views.

What I'm going to say this morning is that Fundamentalism is a kind of allergic reaction to the modern world: to reductionist science and "satanic" humanism, but also very much to more liberal versions of religious faith. And I'm going to say that a chief expression of Fundamentalism is an attempt to turn religious faith into objective fact and political reality.

I heard Karen Armstrong on public radio last spring, discussing her new book, The Battle for God, a study of modern religious fundamentalism. Armstrong was a Roman Catholic nun for 7 years, she has an Oxford degree, and she's done radio and TV productions in Britain. She presently teaches at the Leo Baeck College for the study of Judaism. She received the 1999 Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award, and her principal field is Islamic studies. Her book got good reviews and was called fair and well-intentioned even by conservative Christians. A Catholic teaching Islamic studies at a Jewish school has to have something going for her.

Much of this talk is based on The Battle for God. But I also read The Book of Jerry Falwell, by Susan Harding, a professor of anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, and Fundamentalisms Comprehended, the 5th volume in the series The Fundamentalism Project, edited by the Protestant Martin Marty and the Catholic R. Scott Appleby.

WHAT IS FUNDAMENTALISM?

The word doesn't appear in the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary. It seems to have been used first in the 1920's by conservative American Protestants, to describe their own bible-based faith as opposed to liberal Protestantism and other aspects of the modern world. We use it currently to describe a wide range of religious and even secular movements which may have quite different histories and dynamics.

For example, the thesis of Daniel C. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and E. O. Wilson's Consilience; the Unity of Knowledge, that evolution operates from the molecular level on up well into human culture, has been called Darwinian Fundamentalism. But both these books make their bold assertions from within the framework of good science and are in no way fundamentalist. On the contrary, they represent and symbolize the kind of radical challenge to religious tradition to which fundamentalism is the response. I'll quote a passage from Wilson's Consilience, a fascinating book which I first saw on Bob Olson's coffee table:

• The legacy of the Enlightenment is the belief that entirely on our own we can know, and in knowing, understand, and in understanding, choose wisely. This self-confidence has risen with the exponential growth of scientific knowledge, which is being woven into an increasingly full explanatory web of cause and effect. In the course of the enterprise we have learned a great deal about ourselves as a species. We now better understand where humanity came from, and what it is. Homo sapiens, like the rest of life, was self-assembled. So here we are, no one having guided us to this condition, no one looking over our shoulder, our future entirely up to us.

Public opinion polls indicate, however, that up to 95% of Americans believe that an all powerful God made them, knows and loves them, and firmly guides their lives towards a blissful eternity.

These are the strong expressions of empiricism and transcendentalism that, as Armstrong suggests, appear almost to inspire one another.

Fundamentalist groups have many characteristics in common. These are neatly summarized in Fundamentalisms Comprehended, by Appleby and Marty.

For much of the 19th century, and for the first half of the 20th, the Western world believed that humanity, through reason, science, and technology, was on a clear course toward the mastery of the evils of the human situation. Religious communities were put on the defensive, and they either compromised with the secular world or retreated into cultural ghettos. -- Fundamentalist movements are the historical counterattacks mounted from these religious traditions. They take advantage of the numerous weaknesses and side-effects of modernization, such as crime, supposed "moral decay", breakdown of the family, pollution, poverty, and war.

The Five Ideological Characteristics of Fundamentalism, as outlined by Appleby and others are:

1. reactivity - fundamentalist movements arise in reaction to the marginalization of religion;
2. selectivity - they select only particular aspects of the tradition - for example, Protestant fundamentalists emphasize the apocalyptic prophesies from the biblical books of Revelation and Daniel;
3. moral dualism - the outside world is sinful and doomed; the movement is a pure and redeemed remnant
4. absolutism and inerrancy - the Torah, the Qu'ran, or the Bible is of divine origin and is true and accurate in all particulars;
5. millennealsim and messianism - the Jewish Messiah, the Christian Savior, or the Muslim Hidden Imam will come soon and history will end; the good will triumph and the evil will perish

To summarize: the driving force of fundamentalism is reaction to threat; only certain elements of the old faith are emphasized; the situation is seen as black and white; authority comes from an infallible holy book; and God will save the faithful and destroy the evil world

The Four Organizational Characteristics of Fundamentalism are:

1. an elect or chosen membership;
2. sharp boundaries between saved and sinful;
3. an authoritarian organization - typically there is a single charismatic leader, but, as there can be no loyal opposition, there is also a tendency towards fragmentation;
4. behavioral requirements - a member's time, space, and activity belong to the group; there may be detailed rules about dress, food, sex, speech, discipline, family relations, and, especially, about intellectual activity

Karen Armstrong present similar ideas a little differently.

1. Fundamentalists are in reaction to the modern world. They are often recruited from groups who have suffered rather than benefited from modernization. They have a strong fear of annihilation by secular culture, and their fears are justified. "Fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism, and under attack, it invariably becomes more extreme, bitter, and excessive."

2. In pre-modern times, myth and reason co-existed easily. We were able to thank God for the grain harvest and then use our own skills to bake bread. Fundamentalism tends to take the myths, the spiritual truths which are the basis of religion, and treat them as reasoned scientific truths, as facts. Biblical Creationism is one example. Nazi eugenics was another.

3. Fundamentalist movements are in reaction against the modern world, but they are also part of it. They can be considered as rational, creative, and even "modern" in some sense, rather than as throwbacks to an earlier time. They may be very successful organizationally, like the Taliban, for instance, or the Southern Baptists.

   However...

4. The religious importance of social justice and compassion is explicit in the Koran, the Hebrew Prophets, and the New Testament. At its worst, fundamentalism can become angry and vengeful against its many real and presumed enemies, a kind of religious road rage.

5. At its best, though, fundamentalism provides a safe port for millions of otherwise wandering souls, and its proponents would say in defense of their most extreme beliefs that they are... simply....true.

So, that, roughly, is what Fundamentalism is.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

1) In practical terms, we can't easily ignore armed fundamentalist nations like Afghanistan and Iran, or practices such as the subjugation of women. Nor can we ignore the political and social influence on our own society of a domestic American religious body like the 16 million member fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention.

2) In human terms, trying to understand one another seem to me to be a duty. Our own attitudes and behavior clearly affect the behavior of others, including the fundamentalists. One of the chief characteristics of fundamentalist belief is that it dismisses everyone else's as simply wrong and evil. This is something we can't do.

IRAN, ISRAEL, and the UNITED STATES

Armstrong's book The Battle for God surveys Islam, Judaism, and Christianity from 1500 to the present. I'll limit myself to just a few themes in recent Iranian and Jewish history, and in American Protestant Christianity in the 20th century.

IRAN

Disregarding for a moment all the violence and hyperbole, you might say that the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran just want a safe place to practice their religion.

Iran was a British client state from early in the 1800's. In the later part of the 19th century, Iranian intellectuals embraced western culture. They clashed with their religious leaders and wanted to establish a purely secular state. After the first world war, Britain made Iran a protectorate. Reza Kahn founded the Pahlavi dynasty with British support in 1921. Reza ruthlessly pursued radical secularization and tried to replace Islam with the culture of ancient Persia.

In Armstrong’s words:

"Two nations were developing in Iran, which were increasingly unable to understand each other. One comprised the small Westernized elite of the upper and middle classes who benefited from Reza's modernization program, the other the mass of the poor who were bewildered by the secular nationalization and turned more and more to their religious leaders."

"After 1953, Iran became a privileged American ally.... Over the years the US repeated the old political patterns used by the British: strong-arm tactics in the oil market, undue influence over the monarch, demands for diplomatic immunity, business and trade concessions, and a condescending attitude toward the Iranians themselves. American businessmen ... poured into the country and made a great deal of money. There was a glaring discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of most Iranians; they lived isolated from the people ... and became fatally associated with the regime. ...." The state secret police organization SAVAK was formed with the help of the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. There was fear, hatred, and a barely suppressed rage among religious Muslims.

Despite this turmoil, the Shiite Muslim clergy of Iran had stayed out of politics. For centuries, Shiites had declared all government illegitimate in the absence of the Hidden Imam (the eleventh Imam in succession after Muhammad, supposedly concealed by God since the 9th century ). They thought it was improper for the Ulema (the council of "Learned men", or guardians of legal and religious tradition in Islam) to rule or to be involved in the state.

In 1971, the Ayatollah Khomeini (Ayatollah being an honorific title of a Shiite scholar), published a small book entitled "Islamic Government". Khomeni argued in this book that, in the present emergency, the Ulema must take over the state to safeguard the sovereignty of God. He believed they should create a society based entirely on the laws of Islam, which were of sacred origin. If the people of Iran could live in such a divinely ordered milieu, impelled by the law of the land to live exactly as God intended, their lives would be transformed. -- After a few more years of atrocities by the Shah's government and dumb moves by the West, the Islamic Revolution was inevitable. To bring this all up to date, on the front page of the New York Times for January 16th, 2001, a 26 year old Pakastani terrorist who had killed more than 100 people is quoted as saying: "My goal was not to kill, but I had a line to follow, an Islamic ideal. I knew that Muslims needed their own country, a real Islamic country." -- The country he was referring to is Afghanistan, the place that comes closest to the extremists' ideal of a state ruled by the code of Islamic law.

In Afghanistan, religious myth has become the political reality, with grim results.

ISRAEL

Exiled from Palestine and consistently persecuted for over 2000 years, religious Jews erected a wall of scripture and ritual in defense against a hostile world.

There have been many movements within Judaism, but in general, until the 19th century, you were either an Orthodox Jew or you weren't a Jew at all. Conservative and Liberal Judaism and Modern Orthodoxy arose in the last two centuries in measured accommodation with the modern secular world. They are active primarily in the United States and hardly exist in Israel.

Zionism was the secular movement to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was inspired by Christian anti-Jewish terrorism in Russia and Eastern Europe and by racist anti-Semitism in Western Europe. It got off to a slow start because most Western European Jews felt that they were safely assimilated. Most eastern European Orthodox Jews rejected it on religious grounds. In their view, any human attempt to realize the Kingdom of God in the Holy Land was abhorrent. This was for God to do. The supporters of Zionism were mostly secular, socialist Eastern European Jews..

This is a passage from Chaim Potok's The Chosen, which is set in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn in the early 1940's. The narrator is Reuven Malter, a young rabbinical student.. He is speaking to Reb Saunders, an ultra-conservative Hassidic Rabbi.

• I said quietly, not mentioning my father's name, that a lot of people were now saying that it was time for Palestine to become a Jewish homeland and not only a place where pious Jews went to die.

  Reb Saunders stared at me, his eyes suddenly wild with rage, his beard trembling. And he pointed a finger at me that looked like a weapon. "Who are these people? Who are these people?" he shouted in Yiddish, and the words went through me like knives. "Apiksorim! Goyim! ?Ben Gurion and his goyim will build Eretz Yisroel? ?They will build for us a Jewish land? ?They will bring Torah into this land? Goyishkeit they will bring into the land, not Torah! God will build the land, not Ben Gurion and his goyim! When the Messiah comes, we will have Eretz Yisroel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim!"

Most Orthodox living in Palestine remained opposed to Zionism, and some even blamed it for the Holocaust: Zionism had lured the Jewish people into a dreadful heresy, so it was no wonder that the Lord lashed out in anger. Living, as they felt, in the midst of satanic evil, they tried to segregate themselves in every detail of their lives: in food, dress, and behavior, and to play no part in government or society.

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, had no religious significance for the Orthodox. Some accommodated in practical terms, but most held themselves apart. Yeshivas were established in which men devoted their lives to Torah study. This study was not for the purpose of acquiring information but was a form of communion with the divine, of worship. They believed God had created the earth in order that men could study Torah, and if they ever stopped, the universe would be annihilated.

In the late 1950's, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of Rabbi Abraham Kook went further than his father and claimed the state of Israel was the Kingdom of God, a holy and exhalted state. Religious Jews must take part in politics, and Jews must settle the entire land of Israel, as defined in the bible. The miracle of the six day war proved this was God's intention. Kook’s followers established the Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron and forced the Israeli government to defend it. It remains today a bastion of extreme and provacative fundamentalism. -- Here again, myth is transformed into political policy.

The Yom Kipper war in 1973 was seen by the Orthodox as a warning from God to the Jews to return to religion. The Kookists, a small movement until then, joined the secular hawks and other religious Zionists to form a political pressure group, the Gush Emunim or "block of the faithful" and encouraged both an aggressive religious counterculture and new efforts to establish settlements on the west bank.

In 1977 the right-wing Likud party, headed by Menachim Begin won power, and a massive settlement program was begun.

More Orthodox began to take part in politics to support their own goals, although they kept their distance from goyische culture. Over the past two decades, the ultra-orthodox have grown in numbers, through immigration from other middle eastern countries and a higher birth rate than secular Israelis. They've become increasingly influential in Israel, and their religious views pose a serious obstacle to a political settlement.

AMERICAN PROTESTANT FUNDAMENTALISM

There have been struggles between liberal and conservative religious groups in North America since it was first settled, but in the hopeful times at the beginning of the 20th century even many conservative Protestants supported the progressive "social gospel" and hoped to Christianize the Godless cities and factories of modern America.

Religious conservatives were appalled however, by suggestions like Charles Eliot's in his 1909 lecture, "the Future of Religion", that, with so much progress on all fronts, there could be an end to churches and to the worship of a God whose presence in all things was obvious. There was no need, Eliot said, for anything but the love of God and of our neighbors.

In response, a group of conservative theologians formally stated the beliefs that became the basis of Christian fundamentalism.

These included traditional Christian doctrines such as: 1) the Virgin Birth, 2) Christ's atonement for our sins, and 3) the bodily resurrection, but also, 4) the inerrancy of scripture, that the bible is true, word for word, in both spirit and letter, and 5) pre-millenarianism, the doctrine (based on the biblical books of Revelation and Daniel) that: Jesus Christ would soon return to earth; that he would instantly transport (or "rapture") a small saved remnant up to heaven; that the unsaved majority would suffer 7 years of tribulation; and that then would begin the 1000 year Reign of God, proceeding the Final Judgment. Between 1910 and 1915, a set of pamphlets was published which expounded these truths. They were titled "The Fundamentals."

The extreme violence of World War I seemed to confirm pre-millenarist convictions that the End was near. The Balfour declaration, promising the return of the Jews to Palestine was a sign. The establishment of the League of Nations, identified with the revived Roman Empire as lead by the anti-Christ, was another. Conservatives saw a vast conspiracy involving Roman Catholics, democratic mob rule, peace seekers, and the proponents of world government. The Liberals were seen as in league with the Germans, because Biblical Higher Criticism had originated in Germany, and presumably had caused a collapse in German moral values and the subsequent war. There would be a struggle for the future of civilization, and the churches would be in the front lines fighting against the satanic forces which would destroy the world.

By the early 1920's, religious conservatives were in a strong position. Having been successful in helping to bring about Prohibition, they opposed the teaching of evolution in public schools.

As a result of the 1925 Scopes trail, however, fundamentalists, and bible-believing Protestants generally, suffered a spectacular and highly publicized defeat and remained partial exiles from public life for the next 50 years. During this time America was perceived as becoming modern and fully secular.

Susan Harding writes in The Book of Jerry Falwell:

"The presumption was grounded in an escalating string of oppositions between Fundamentalist and modern: supernaturalist and reasoning, backward and progressive, ignorant and educated, rural and cosmopolitan, superstitious and scientific, bigoted and tolerant, authoritative and democratic. " "Fundamentalism was a rigid, homogeneous thing stuck in the past, and modernity was the multifaceted, ever-changing face of the future. The central story line of this history, both folk and official, anticipated the increasing marginalization, if not the disappearance, of Fundamentalism, and of supernatural religiousity generally, in America."

It didn't happen that way of course..

After the Scopes trial, the fundamentalists withdrew and became more extreme. Armstrong writes, "Fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism, and under attack, invariably becomes more extreme, bitter, and excessive." Fundamentalism was becoming a religion of rage rooted in fear.

Conservatives either left their mainstream denominations and formed new organizations untainted by modern theology, or they stayed in the denominations and waited.

A defensive counterculture developed. Fundamentalist bible colleges, publishing and broadcasting organizations, and radio evangelists, created a home for fundamentalists in a hostile world. Bob Jones University was founded as a "safe" school in which faith and a Christian lifestyle were preserved while students were educated to fight atheism. Disobedience and disloyalty were not permitted here. Bob Jones became the largest supplier of fundamentalist teachers in the country. .

Armstrong writes, "We know now that strict Bible belief in America did not diminish but rather flourished during the middle half of the twentieth century; and, after World War II, it became more heterogeneous, urban, upwardly mobile, educated, and nationally engaged, along with the rest of the country."

Since the Scopes trial, the Fundamentalists had lived in a separate world. Through the chaotic 60's they stayed outsiders but were becoming a much larger constituency. By 1979, a Gallup pole indicated that 1/3 of Americans considered themselves born-again Christians. 25% believed in the inerancy of the Bible. 80% believed Jesus divine, and 95% believed God loved them. Pat Robertson said in 1980, "We have enough votes to run this country".

During the 1980's, Bible-believing, white Protestant Christians in America broke the half century of quarantine with the Moral Majority, televangelism, and religious talk radio. They turned to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart. They decided to fight secular humanism. Values that humanists and liberal Christians would regard as self-evidently good, such as environmentalism, world peace, the reduction of poverty, and women's rights, they regarded as manifestly evil.

Secular humanism was seen as a vast conspiracy of government, foundations, universities, Wall Street., Zionism, the Soviet Union, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve. The growth of industrial South, the expansion of the federal govt, the Supreme Court's outlawing obligatory worship and bible reading in schools and revoking the tax exemption of some segregationist fundamentalist colleges, the ERA, homosexual rights, and legalized abortion, all challenged conservative Christians.

JERRY FALWELL

More than any other preacher, Jerry Falwell changed Bible prophecy from being a rationale for separation from the world into a rhetoric of engagement with the world.

Falwell says: "Is there hope for our country? I think so. I believe as we Christians lead the battle to outlaw abortion, as we take our stand against the breakdown of the traditional family and the promotion of homosexual marriages, as we stand up for strong national defense, I believe there is hope that God one more time will bless America. I believe that between now and the rapture of the Church, America can have a reprieve."

The 1980's fundamentalist reform movement included Falwell's fundamentalist Thomas Road Baptists, the Southern Baptist Convention, and conservative evangelicals in general. Their leaders drew a line in the sand on the matter of Bible inerrancy and defined new litmus tests of Bible truth , such as strict Creationism and God's absolute opposition to abortion and homosexuality, and they set out to defend Christian values in public life and save America.

In 1996 Jerry Falwell formally affiliated his church with the Southern Baptist Convention.

The SBC was formed in 1845, as the pro-slavery wing of the American Baptist churches. After the Civil War it provided a consolation and a fall-back position for the demoralized southern soldiers. At 16 million members, the SBC is today the largest Protestant religious organization in the U.S. It has long provided support services for thousands of individual southern Baptist churches: in education, media, financial help, and missions. It was able to do this because it interfered very little with the beliefs and practices of individual congregations.

By the early 1990's, however, after a 10 year internal struggle, the fundamentalists took control of the Convention and began to require uniform standards of belief and behavior. This may defeat them in the long run. When internal opposition isn't recognized, the only possibility is a split. Jimmy Carter reluctantly left the SBC last fall, when it outlawed women clergy. Creeds had been played down in Baptist churches, but the SBC introduced the Southern Baptist Faith and Message in 1925 and has tightened it several times since then.

BAPTIST FAITH AND MESSAGE 1998

From the Preamble:

"New challenges to faith appear in every age. A pervasive anti-supernaturalism in the culture was answered by Southern Baptists in 1925, when the Baptist Faith and Message was first adopted by this Convention. In 1963, Southern Baptists responded to assaults upon the authority and truthfulness of the Bible by adopting revisions to the Baptist Faith and Message. The Convention added an article on "The Family" in 1998, thus answering cultural confusion with the clear teachings of Scripture. Now, faced with a culture hostile to the very notion of truth, this generation of Baptists must claim anew the eternal truths of the Christian faith."

Three recent additions from the 1998 Message:

"The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God's revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. ....

"Christians should oppose all forms of sexual immorality, including homosexuality. We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death. ....

"A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.....

PREMILENIALISM

As premilenialists, the fundamentalists had long believed that since the world was doomed there was no point in trying to reform it (or even to conserve it, if we remember James Watt). But they were also becoming affluent and at home in America, and felt a new confidence and power.

Gradually throughout the 80's and 90's many small changes effected a big change in the narrative of bible-prophecy. It began to be used to urge American Christians to engage in the world and take political action during the last days of human history.

The UN, AIDS, New Age, satanic cults, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, divorce, crime, drugs, the Gulf War, Mid-East Peace efforts, Bill Clinton, NAFTA, The Iternet, and UFO's were all considered part of God's plan.

As Harding puts it:

"To the born-again, biblical stories are not allegorical, nor do they merely represent history. They are history, past and future. Nor are the storied events that prefigure and fulfill each other connected by mere cause and effect... Former events do not bring about later ones but rather reveal in advance God's plan.... Christians through their actions today cannot alter God's plan, but they may be enacting it."

"Bible prophecy is the lens through which 20 to 30 million Bible-believing Christians in America read current history and the daily news.... Current events are signs of the times. They are inside Bible-based history. They are evidence that God and Satan are coming to final blows over the fate of mankind."

CONCLUSION

I'd like to end by reading two brief passages from Chaim Potok's The Promise, which is a sequel to The Chosen, and one from Susan Harding' s The book of Jerry Falwell.

The Promise is set in Brooklyn in 1948.

In the first passage Reuven Malter is talking with a troubled young man about Rav Kalman, an ultra-conservative rabbinical scholar and Holocaust survivor:

• "Rav Kalman is an angry person," I said. "But he suffered. He lost his whole world, and people who are suffering sometimes take out their suffering on others. They defend what the ones they loved died for. They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much."

In the second passage Reuven and his father have just left the Hasidic wedding of Reuven's best friend Danny and are talking about Danny's Hasidic father:

• "He is a remarkable man." my father murmured. "They are remarkable people. There is so much about them that is distasteful to me. But they are remarkable people."

  "I wish they weren't so afraid of new ideas," I said.

  "You want a great deal, Reuven. The Messiah has not yet come. Will new ideas enable them to go on singing and dancing?"

  "We can't ignore the truth, abba."

  "No," he said. "We cannot ignore the truth. At the same time, we cannot quite sing and dance as they do."

At the end of The book of Jerry Falwell, Susan Harding recounts something that happened to her in the mid-1980's:

Charlotte, a member of Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Thomas Road Baptist Church who Susan stayed with in Lynchburg while researching her book, has come to New York along with her son David. With Susan, they visit the Empire State Building, and after staying out on the platform alone for a few minutes, Charlotte comes back inside:

• "David," she says, "you are going to laugh when you get back to Lynchburg, about how your mother cried on top of the Empire State Building. I was looking down on the city, and I thought about all those people down there who've never heard the gospel. I wondered, what does God see when he looks down on New York? And it just broke my heart. All the lost, lonely, destitute people, crowing for identity, their lives empty and cold without Jesus. There are millions of people down there who have never heard the Word, who don't know how much God loves them and that Jesus died for them. I saw a cross coming down from the sky reaching right into the city. It's the channel of communication God has given us if only we will open our hearts. So many people here, convinced they are all alone, that no one can help them. But they are so wrong. If only they would ask, the Lord will help them. He's their true friend, and he's there for everyone."

  Charlotte caught us up in her evangelistic vision for a few minutes, then dried her eyes and suggested we go to lunch. Before we left, she put a tract, a little pamphlet explaining God's plan for salvation, on the window ledge.