Worldview

Voice backs Reagan

Christian Voice, a multimillion-dollar political action lobby of evangelical Christians, is backing Ronald Reagan for President, says the organization's legislative director.

"We are mailing several million letters on behalf of Reagan," said Voice's Washington-based legislative director Gary Jarmin. Christian Voice is the largest of new Christian lobbies organized to enlist fundamentalist support for conservative Christian candidates and to target liberal office holders for defeat.

Mr. Jarmin said the organization has 126,000 registered members across the country, including 2,000 ministers from more than 40 denominations and 350 Roman Catholic priests.

President Carter has lost the group's confidence because he has "subordinated his own [religious] principles," said Jarmin. "He also surrounded him self with people and advisors who don't have strong spiritual convictions and don't reflect Christian principles. They are secular humanists."

The number one priority of Christian Voice, according to Jarmin, is a school prayer amendment. Also on the organization's hit list are sex and violence on television, pornography, abortion, and attempts of Government agencies to challenge the tax-exempt status of Christian schools.

"What we really have here," said W. Melvin Adams, director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's Department of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty, "is a very determined group of misguided people committed to repeating the mistakes of the past.

"The Christian Voice, with its amalgam of religion and politics, is a reincarnation of the National Reform Association, which in the late 1800's tried to write a religious amendment to the U.S. Constitution and was behind the national Sunday law introduced into Congress in 1888."

Said Adams: "The Christian Voice seeks to return us to the European model of church-state union that sent our fore fathers fleeing to this land. With the Christian Voice we decry the evils of our day, but we insist that the answer is not a religious amendment to the Constitution. Jesus said that all who worship Him must do so in spirit and in truth. A state-written prayer forced upon students in public schools will not supply that need. Jesus did not say 'Tarry ye in Washington, D.C., until you get power from the Congress.' He said, 'Tarry ye in Jerusalem until ye get power from on high.' This, not political action, which can only have the effect of further dividing Christians who have differing ideas on political matters, is the great need of our day."

Swiss reject separation

Swiss sundaes will still have to be eaten on Monday.

And Swiss Thomas Jeffersons must flee to fairer shores.

By a 3-1 margin, voters in Switzerland have rejected a referendum that would have separated church and state.

Voters in all 26 cantons rejected the referendum, which was put on the ballot by an initiative signed by more than 60,000 citizens. The two French-speaking cantons had the highest percentage of supporters for the referendum—Geneva (35 percent) and Neuchatel (31 percent). Roman Catholic cantons overwhelmingly defeated the referendum—in one the vote ran 96.2 percent against.

In most Swiss cantons direct aid is given to the churches or they are allowed to collect their own taxes. The proposed amendment would have transferred authority over aid to the churches from the canton to the federal government and would have ended government collecting of taxes for the churches.

Presently, for example, Basel imposes taxes on Protestants, Catholics, and Jews and turns the money over to the churches and synagogues. (Basel is unique in its recognition of Judaism.) A person can avoid the tax by renouncing church membership.

With the referendum defeated, Switzerland's strict Sunday laws can be expected to remain in force. And Swiss Thomas Jeffersons must still flee if they feel as their namesake did: "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical."

"Unsure" prophecies

Judging by failure of their predictions, America's top psychics, including Jeane Dixon, had better consider trading in their crystal balls for the "sure word of prophecy" (2 Peter 1:19).

Items: Jeane Dixon, who announced in 1977 that the late Pope Paul VI would be around for four more years, predicted that in 1979 Pope John Paul II "will ease church rules," and that "many Catholics will find John Paul unorthodox in his thinking."

Psychic-astrologer Frederick Davis must have mistaken a comet for a star when he predicted that in 1979 Pope John Paul II "will stagger the religious world by announcing his plans for the ordination of women priests."

Chicago psychic Olof Jonsson predicted that the "real" Holy Shroud (or burial cloth of Jesus) would be found in Egypt.

Other predictions from psychic fantasies of 1979: "Blood will be spilled as fighting breaks out between Israel and Egypt again in May. Surprisingly, [CBS anchorman] Walter Cronkite will be influential in getting both sides back to the conference table, where a new peace agreement will be hammered out."

"Muhammad Ali will win a seat in Congress."(Instead, in early 1980, he won an assignment for Carter in Africa.)

"President Carter will be injured in a hang-gliding accident between April 8 and 10."

"Uganda dictator Idi Amin will be assassinated March 13."

One prediction was half right: "Ted Kennedy will make a bid for the presidency, with John Connally as his running mate."

These, and other predictions relating to an "alien space station," the stopping of inflation "dead in its tracks," and so on, were published in editions of the National Enquirer and The Star—the supermarket staples.

Neither Jeane Dixon nor any of the ten leading psychics had a word to say about Iran, let alone predicting the upheaval there and the taking of American hostages.

Jesus, however, had something to say of our age when He predicted that "false prophets" shall arise (Matt. 24:24). In contrast to the false, He set forth His own credentials, based on His integrity as a sure foreteller of events: "Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he" (John 13:19).

The "unsure" prophecies of the psychics would seem to provide their own testimony to the integrity of Jesus, "the way, the truth, and the life."