Radical Reform

A consensus has been growing, among young people especially, that certain evils and injustices in the social order demand swift, possibly convulsive, change. Certain conditions clearly cannot continue without disastrous consequences. The question remaining is what road do we take? There is a road to change that leads to disaster.

A British missionary, Geoffrey Bull, who was witness to the progress of the Chinese revolution in the early 1950s wrote, “My eyes were being opened to the fact that the Communistic Revolution was run on principles. That it was not just hordes of rebels overrunning everything but was attracting the finest youth of China into its ranks, who were being filled with enthusiasm to devote their all that their nation might become strong and free. They had seen a form of tyranny in the old regime with its privileges for the few and its starvation, floods, disease, and sheer ruin for the millions. They demanded liberation…. Nearly all young China, in the flush of their high aspirations, had followed (the Revolution), braving hardship and privation for the emancipation and reconstruction of their nation…. They had not yet awakened to the new and more sinister spiritual bondage that had begun to engulf them.” Nor did they know that, within a few years, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students would become slave laborers with “lifetime work assignments” on farms and in factories.

We live in an age of urgent social and economic needs. Such needs are made, by some, the excuse for violent, accusatory propaganda and for attempts to overthrow existing structures and to put a dictatorship of a minority in their place. That minority, like all dictatorships, holds itself to be all-wise over the rest of the people. In the name of radical reform, it would wrest from them their rights to liberty. Among them are some who, posing as the enemies of injustice, are virulent enemies of freedom, eaten with the desire to destroy the institutions of liberty.

Some of the ills and problems of our society are accurately diagnosed, but the remedies cannot meet the need. Social work per se falls always short, in scope and especially in compassion. Agitation alone and the call for violent revolution solve nothing and they often add disruption and suffering to a troubled situation. The searing trials we now face as a nation can be met only by men called by God and empowered by more than human strength.