William Safire, the New York Times columnist who died of pancreatic cancer over the weekend, was not exactly an admirer of WORLD Magazine. Early in the year 2000, he wrote a blistering piece accusing WORLD of virtually every sin in the book of journalism ethics. Specifically, he was upset that George W. Bush had just defeated John McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary—at a time when all the mainstream media had made it clear they wanted McCain to win. In his column, Safire said WORLD had timed a major story about McCain to come out just before the election, deliberately raising negative issues McCain would have no opportunity to answer. And he complained darkly that because Bob Jones IV, our main political reporter at that time, had done our story, there had to be some connection with the fact that Bush had spoken during the campaign at Bob Jones University while McCain had never been invited to do so.

Three times over the next half dozen years, I stopped by Safire’s office in downtown Washington. It wasn’t that I wanted to complain; I just wanted to meet the man who had gone from being a speechwriter for Richard Nixon to being the Times’ main Washington observer. But I missed him all three times. His secretary, though, assured me that he received and read WORLD, and that she would let him know I had come by.

Then, about two years ago, I stopped with a friend for a sandwich at a small delicatessen a couple of blocks from Safire’s office—and who should be sitting there reading his paper but Safire himself. Boldly and a bit rudely, I broke into his reading: “Mr. Safire,” I said, “you’ve got no way of knowing me—I’m Joel Belz with WORLD Magazine. I doubt if you remember . . .” “Of course I do, he said, pulling out the empty chair beside him. “I did a piece about you after the Republican primary in 2000. I don’t think what I said was very complimentary. How did you do after that?”

“As a matter of fact,” I told him, “you were quite a help to us. In a sense, you put us on the map. We had never earned that kind of mention in The New York Times before. But you may have overestimated our influence. I frankly doubt that even if everything you said was true we could have made that much difference.”

He grinned, and reached out his hand to shake mine. “I still follow you from week to week,” he said, confirming what his secretary had told me. “And I wish you well.”

This weekend, Pastor Rick Warren will speak at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention.

To critics of Warren, who think it’s wrong on the face of the matter for him to speak at an event sponsored by Muslims, I say: Wait until you hear what Warren says.

Since the Supreme Court decision a couple of days ago with reference to racial discrimination in the case of the New Haven, Conn., firefighters, many usually shrewd observers have noted what a strong indicator the decision is that Sonia Sotomayor simply lacks the qualifications to make sound judgments. Thomas Sowell, for example, said today: “For the fourth time in six cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has reversed a decision for which Judge Sonia Sotomayor voted in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. If this nominee were a white male, would this not raise questions about whether he should be elevated to a court that has found his previous decisions wrong two-thirds of the times when those decisions have been reviewed?”

Sowell and the others are missing the point. It’s precisely because Sotomayor is being reversed again and again that her sponsor-in-chief, Barack Obama, wants her on the high court. He wants to change the Supreme Court just as radically, and as fast, as he’s trying to change everything else. He thinks the court, especially the way it voted Monday, is dead wrong, and he wants to hurry Sotomayor onto the bench so that chances of a 5-4 vote the other way are enhanced. The argument that Sotomayor has been overturned two-thirds of the time is exactly why Obama and his friends want her so badly.

If I told you that there’s someone in my very middle-class neighborhood who, rather than being upset with the high-speed re-direction of our culture toward a socialist mindset, is ready to pour billions of additional dollars into completing that transition, would it bother you?

What if I said that there’s someone just like that in your neighborhood as well? And someone with identical intentions in every neighborhood in America?

You know, if you’re a regular reader of my columns, that I don’t truck in conspiracy theories. So I’m not here to tell you some dark and scary secrets. I will argue, on the other hand, how frightening it is that something can be so very out in the open and still escape our attention. And then I want to propose something of an answer.

The sinister influence is the state-sponsored school system. I already argued here, quite recently, how absurd it is to fret about the possibility of nationalized banks, nationalized auto manufacturers, nationalized health care, nationalized energy producers, nationalized retirement programs, and nationalized radio networks—how absurd it is to worry about all that when we long ago nationalized the educational systems that shape the worldview of 90 percent of all Americans.

Why should anyone be even the tiniest bit surprised if people who have been taught by statist educators should end up with statist ideas and values? Why, indeed, should we expect them to have anything else? (To make matters worse, we have to admit, way too many private educators—especially on the college and graduate level—have joined the chorus of those singing the praises of statist solutions.)

Now, of course, in a blitzkrieg of incredibly quick developments, we’re watching the actualization of precisely what just a few months ago we so much feared. And only a relative few seem at all concerned that their nation is not just looking in a socialist direction, but is trundling happily down that path.

Maybe we should get used to the fact that there is no short-term solution. So here’s something to think about. What if we could demonstrate that saying goodbye to statist education would save the public profound amounts of money—and produce a more educated public at the same time? What if we could make that demonstration in a manner that was palatable to the huge public-education bureaucracy?

Everyone should get well acquainted with these basic facts; the estimated figures are almost certainly tilted not against but in favor of statist schools:

• About one in six Americans (around 50 million people) are students somewhere—kindergarten through high school.
• About 9 out of 10 of those 50 million (45 million people) are in state-sponsored schools; about 1 out of 10 (5 million people) are in private schools or are homeschooled.
• State-sponsored education at these levels typically costs in excess of $12,000 per student per year. The total bill is well over $500 billion every year.
• Privately sponsored education is typically accomplished at a per-student average of $9,000 per year—about 75 percent of the cost of statist education. (The comparable cost of homeschooling is harder to calculate).

Here’s the point—and the proposal. A $500 billion budget item is no trifling matter. It offers huge possibilities for savings. A measly 1 percent cut amounts to $5 billion!

So why not make an offer to 10 percent of America’s publicly educated students—that’s 4.5 million children—to take a $6,000 annual buyout to choose a non-public school that they like? Instead of spending $12,000 each on those 4.5 million kids, the public will have to spend only $6,000—a savings of $27 billion for the various public purses involved. Even in Washington, $27 billion should count for something.

Or, to make it really palatable to the bureaucracy, offer just $5,000 to the student—and a $1,000 bonus to the public school that now has no obligation to spend a single penny on said student! The more who leave, the bigger the bonus. (There’s plenty of precedent in farm country where farmers have long been subsidized for not farming.) Both sides should find that worth some doodling on a scratchpad.

In ordinary times, I understand why all this would be like whistling in the wind. But these are hardly ordinary times.

To hear commentaries by Joel Belz, click here.

The arrival of three of my young grandsons to visit for a few days would normally be the occasion of a good bit of delight. But when Levi, Isaiah, and Abel drove in with their parents from St. Louis last week, I found myself unable to look them in the eye.

My problem, of course, was that the news media had been telling us for a couple of weeks how much the new bills making their way through Congress were going to add to the national debt—and how our grandchildren were the ones who would be picking up the bill. Bad timing for a family get-together.

The math was damning. Start with the $700 billion bailout Congress had authorized last fall, even before the election. Add the almost $800 billion stimulus package approved this month. But don’t forget the $500 billion that Uncle Sam was already having to borrow just to balance this year’s operating budget. Those three figures total $2,000 billion—or $2 trillion dollars in new debt.

Now divide that $2 trillion by 300,000,000 Americans and you’ll discover that we’ve just added about $7,000 per person to our national debt. Just for Levi, Isaiah, and Abel, that’s $21,000 of new debt—which is quite a sum for boys who are only 7, 5, and not quite 2. I should note that none of the three yet has a job, which means their mom and dad will probably have to shoulder this burden for a while. Counting them, the family debt jumped by about $35,000. Just the interest on that amount is going to run over $100 a month. The boys’ dad is a pastor, and $100 a month isn’t going to be all that easy to find.

It gets worse. Levi, Isaiah, and Abel are only three of my 15 grandchildren. With their parents (and one grandpa and one grandma), the total new debt incurred over the last few weeks totals $189,000. That’s the price of a house in many parts of the country. Sadly, our family incurred all this new debt, and there’s no house to show for it. In fact, I can’t point to anything we have to show for it.

Hold on, though, because it gets still worse. I could tell you that it gets worse because all this is brand new debt—added to the $35,000 that each of my grandchildren owed before this mindless new round started. So their individual obligation is in fact jumping from $35,000 to $42,000—and their extended family obligation from $945,000 to $1,134,000.

But by now, if you’re like me, you’ve lost track of the zeroes. And that is where things have especially gotten worse. The American population—from the president, down to the secretary of the Treasury, down to the Wall Street bankers, and then all the way down to the rest of us—no longer has a clue what is going on with the economy. Even at the level of the intelligentsia, we have become functionally ignorant of how money works. Our leaders have taught us, and we have gullibly believed, that we could break all the basic rules and still have something big to enjoy ourselves and then to pass on to our grandchildren.

Nor am I just sitting here pointing my fingers at the bad guys. I am guilty on this front, and many of my friends are owning up as well. And the world of evangelical Christians is little different from the secular world at large on this front.

And if it’s not embarrassing enough how skimpy our knowledge is, we tend not even to live up to that knowledge. We all know in theory, for example, how enslaving consumer debt has a tendency to be. But we wrap our lives in debt, glibly certain the rules will never apply to us.

Of course it matters how many zeroes get tacked on to the debt soon to be inherited by the likes of Levi, Isaiah, and Abel. What matters a whole lot more is whether the rest of us come to our senses and find far better tools than any we’ve used so far to teach the next generation how to handle its money.

To those who say it may be too late—that an $11 trillion debt about to become $13 trillion is beyond rescue—I challenge you: Can you really look your grandchild in the eye and tell him or her that you’ve given up? If instead you have an idea or two about effective ways to teach the basics of economics to elementary children, I’d love to hear from you. It’s important enough that we’ll mention it again on WORLDmag.com and in WORLD.

I heard once about a lamebrain professor who unhelpfully labeled the two big stacks of books on his desk. One sign proclaiming “READ” was to remind him, past tense, of what he’d already accomplished. The other placard stating “READ” helped organize his unfinished future tense tasks.

So, perhaps like you, I’m sitting here early in 2009 confused and wondering why my first stack of books is always so much smaller than the second.

Today I have a good excuse. It’s true that just to the right of my office chair is an embarrassingly high (about 31 inches, to be exact) stack that should have an “UNREAD” label on it. These are books whose content I feel some desire to assimilate, or books whose authors I feel some obligation to honor by taking a look at what they’ve written.

But besides all that, I have three other stacks of urgent reading assignments—typically involving items that haven’t yet been published as books.

First come some books not yet available but already scheduled for actual publication within the next few months. I have them in pretty much final typeset form, and either the authors or the publishers are asking me now to write a little blurb saying how important this book is and how different it is from anything out there. (Some authors and publishers even send out pre-written versions of such blurbs, so all I have to do is to choose the one I like best. In case you’re ever tempted to do that, I should tell you that it’s a pretty big turn-off). This is time-consuming, because I refuse to write a blurb for a book I haven’t read.

Second are the manuscripts from would-be authors. Sometimes these are in very preliminary form; a couple have even been in longhand. Sometimes these works-of-a-lifetime have already been shopped to half a dozen publishers and their authors have seen about as many rejection notices as they can stand in one lifetime. They write to ask: Please show me how to prove the publishers wrong. I typically write back to plead: I know little enough about magazines, and nothing at all about books. But I do sneak a look at some of these, and am impressed that a few of them didn’t get accepted when some much worse stuff did. Making that sad discovery also takes time.

Today I’m working on the third category of manuscripts. It’s probably the hardest, but the most rewarding. Today I’m reading term papers from six high-school seniors.

These are not run-of-the-mill term papers. To be a senior at Asheville Christian Academy in Asheville, N.C., is to be required to pick a serious issue confronted in our modern secular culture, analyze the problems involved, and suggest an answer that is shaped by God’s revelation in the Bible. I call it Worldview Thinking 101; it’s an assignment not enough Christian adults ever faced as part of their education.

Tonight, those seniors will also sweat it out as a panel of critics (including me) quizzes them about their research, their understanding and documentation of the topic, their writing skills, their argumentation, and their biblical perspective.

They all picked timely subjects: anorexia among young women, even in the Christian community; the impact of ethical behavior on profits in the business world; the influence of the mainstream media in shaping Christians’ thinking and values; the role of “micro enterprise” in helping women in Third World economies; ingredients of “Christian” art; and the use of drama in evangelism.

But naturally, the six students showed an uneven ability to argue their main points. I hardly expected them to be equal in their rhetorical skills—and they weren’t. Their grammar was good, but not always perfect. I could be wrong, but my sense right now is that only one of them will end up writing a book someday.

And that will be just fine with me. I’m almost certain the other five will be just as relieved as I will be if no one ever asks them to write a whole book. God is giving them other important tasks to accomplish in His kingdom, which they will do with more insight and additional leadership simply because they have been taught to think in a God-centered way.

And it’s fine with me also because my stack of unread books in the future will be just that much smaller and more manageable.

To hear commentaries by Joel Belz, click here.

Judging by all I’ve heard for the last few weeks, there are thousands of people out there far more worried about Rick Warren’s prayer this morning than Rick Warren is.

I don’t know Rick Warren well. But from the time I have spent with him, I have a hunch he’ll offer an actual prayer—not a speech, or even a sermon, disguised as a prayer. I hope he’ll offer up his desires to God on America’s behalf, for things agreeable to God’s will, in the name of Jesus, with confession of our sins, and grateful acknowledgment of God’s mercies. That’s what prayer is.

I was at Saddleback Church last August when Warren invited Barack Obama and John McCain for a pair of interviews that many observers said were the best interviews of the whole presidential campaign. Reporters in the big media center couldn’t get over the fact that Warren pulled no punches. He was very much himself through the whole event, and that integrity won him a noticeable round of support from those who, going into the afternoon, had been nothing but cynical.

There are cynics again today. Some worry that Warren will get too preachy. Some worry he’ll betray his Christian faith and forget to mention the name of Jesus.

I expect Warren to pray.

ADDENDUM: Here’s video of Pastor Warren’s prayer:

If you didn’t wince a bit while President Bush attempted a couple of weeks ago—on national television, no less—to give an account of his Christian faith, well then maybe you too ought to go back and take a refresher course in Christianity 101.

I take seriously the testimony of friends who have worked closely with the president, who speak of the sincerity of his profession of faith in Christ and of his personal commitment to walk in biblical obedience.

But let’s face it. Bush, based on what he told the folks on ABC’s Nightline, wouldn’t have passed a basic membership interview in most churches I know. “What do you think faith gave you that you needed?” the reporter asked. “It gave me strength and—strength and understanding. There’s love, universal love. My faith at this point in my life has enabled me to accept people’s prayers and this made a huge difference in my life. There’s a lot of dramatic moments and pressure. There are calm moments. How do you know? It’s about prayer. For many people, it’s a crutch, but for me it is—it’s the realization of a power of a universal God, and recognition that this God became manifested in human. And then died for sins.”

This is painful to hear—even when the soon-to-be former president, in his wonderfully affable manner, discounts it all with a smile and says that no, of course he doesn’t plan to become a preacher when he leaves office. “Are you kidding me? I’m going to be—I’m going to be trying to stay on the walk to the last day on the face of the earth. It is—the interesting thing that I have come to this conclusion, maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, but the full understanding of Christianity is going to take a full lifetime of study.”

Bush is right, of course, that the Christian faith encompasses all sorts of mysteries. But there’s a difference between mystery and mush. When you read Bush’s actual words in the rest of the interview, including his doubts concerning the literal truth of the Bible and his skepticism that Jesus is the only way to God, you are forced to ask in all candor: Has this man ever subjected himself to any serious, consistent preaching of Christian truth? Has he ever participated not just in devotional reading, but some disciplined or organized study of the Bible?

These are crucial issues. Those of us who believe that the faithful, Spirit-energized preaching of God’s Word is critical in the lives of God’s people shouldn’t assume that an individual person—even a president of the United States—can somehow know the truth apart from regular and frequent exposure to that preached Word. Those of us who believe that comprehensive, careful, and thoughtful education in what we call a “Christian worldview” shouldn’t suppose that someone—even a president—can somehow automatically be equipped with all the tools and filled with all the nuances of such thinking without some regular exposure to that worldview.

It won’t surprise readers of this column to hear me say that, from the time he first appeared on the national scene, I’ve been more of a George Bush fan than a George Bush skeptic. I’ve usually had confidence—and still tend to keep it—that his inclinations are sound. To this day, for example, his main inclinations with reference to Iraq have been right on. I am grateful for his gut instincts about the nature of terrorism; those instincts have served his nation well. (Much less reassuring has been Mr. Bush’s free-thinking inclination in recent days to enable the virtual nationalization of the Big Three automobile industry.)

But the fact is that inclinations, instincts, and intuitions, by themselves, are never enough. They have to be tested, disciplined, honed, and polished. Over the years, that process should lead systematically to a person’s understanding of and ability to express what he believes to be true about life—what he believes to be true about issues both big and small.

So it is disquieting to see a man express himself so casually, so haltingly, and so dismissively about some of life’s biggest and most eternal issues. It’s hard not to remember that high on the list of Bush’s critics has been the accusation that he relies overly much on instinct and intuition and too little on rigorous reflection.

Now he prepares to leave his bully pulpit. We pray that both he, his successor in office, and the nation that has taken such fierce blows during his tenure will all be blessed with better directed and less sloppy habits—both in personal faith and in the pursuit of righteous national policy.

“Give me a long enough lever,” said Archimedes, “and I can move the world.”

Paul Weyrich, who died yesterday at the age of 66, applied such leverage better than anybody in the conservative/Christian movement. He was that rarity of a man who, when you looked around the room, was both the most principled person there—and the most pragmatic.

Those who will record the history of the American conservative movement for the last half of the 1900s will naturally be obliged to include William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, who was the ultimate political expression of the foundations laid by the other two. But anyone who understands anything at all about what really happened through those years knows that the Reagan presidency, humanly speaking, would never have happened without the insights, the energy, and the work of Paul Weyrich. He was brilliant, he was strategic, he was relentless, and he was brutally honest. In all that, he seemed to sense better than all his colleagues what would work—what and where leverage needed to be applied at any particular moment in history to move things most.

So it was Paul Weyrich who was front and center in the formation of such diverse organizations as the Moral Majority (he told me more than once how much he regretted inadvertently providing that name) and The Heritage Foundation, of which he was the first president and which became the most influential conservative think tank in Washington. Always, Weyrich was a teacher. Just being right was never enough. You had to do the hard work, he always stressed, of demonstrating how your right beliefs could make a difference in society. And you had to teach others to be similarly involved.

Paul Weyrich didn’t start off as an evangelical. His close working relationship with so many in the evangelical world tugged him in that direction, prompting him increasingly in recent years to speak openly, simply, and warmly of his faith in Christ. He was a critical lynch pin between secular and Christian conservatives—never hesitating, for example, to champion the pro-life cause even when secular conservatives expressed their embarrassment over the issue.

Conservatives in the United States are still counting their losses during the year 2008. None may be bigger than this artful user of a very long lever.

Nothing was uglier—bordering even on treasonous—during the recent presidential campaign than the way George Bush’s opponents seemed so regularly to welcome bad news from Iraq. Included among his “opponents” in that sense were the Democratic campaigns, for sure. But displaying the same despicable habit were many in the mainstream media.

Nor was the tendency limited to bad news about the war. Who will ever know the extent to which Democratic connivance and media lopsidedness didn’t just respond to, but actually helped bring about, the current economic disaster?

But I mention that here not to heap still more criticism on Bush’s opponents. I cite these issues instead as examples of behavior that biblically directed conservatives should take care to avoid in their own opposition in the months and years ahead to the presidency of Barack Obama.

I am hearing regularly from WORLD readers who seem intent on only one goal: They are zealous, already, for the failure of the Obama presidency. Indeed, nothing would make them happier than for the Obama presidency to be stillborn.

So, instead of quietly thanking God for a peaceful election and an apparently tranquil transfer of power—and then getting on with the monumental tasks before us—some of these folks won’t be satisfied until they can prove that the Obama presidency itself is illicit. “In what sense,” one Indiana subscriber asks me in an email, “am I biblically responsible to be subject to a man who unconstitutionally calls himself my president?”

Which makes me wonder: Did Nero have to produce a Roman Empire birth certificate before there was binding force to Paul’s instruction in Romans 13? He’s pretty straightforward: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”

But it’s not just individual letter-writers. You get the impression that whole conservative watchdog organizations face extinction if you don’t give generously—today!—to ensure their ability to maintain litigation that will finally expose our new president’s Islamic faith and alien roots. To which I am inclined to say: Good riddance! Let them collapse of their own awkward weight. If there was once a time to explore such bizarre possibilities, that time almost certainly ended with the election.

It’s not the risks to the direct mail operatives that should worry us. It’s the risk to the republic if we set millions of folks over against each other debating such technicalities. Do folks have any sense at all how devastating to orderliness it might be for a challenge to the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency to gain even minimal traction?

Here’s the point: Never let it be legitimately said that our main goal is to destroy our opponent or his presidency. Always let it be said that our focus is on the issues themselves—and that, having debated those issues, we are content to leave in God’s sovereign hands the political results.

Admittedly, such a distinction may not always be easy to maintain—and especially so with someone who has an agenda so unambiguously fastened to the liberal left. His support for abortion, for special privileges for homosexuals, for state-controlled education, for overweening government regulation, and a hundred other liberal causes is well established. And his calculated coolness in driving that agenda heightens the temptation to expose every conceivable weakness of the man instead of seeking, through the electoral and legislative process, to defeat the policy enactment of his program. It’s time to prove it possible again to say: “We respect you, Mr. President—along with your office. And at the same time we think you are very wrong.”

Unless we learn to do that, though—and not just in a trivial way—we demean the very office we want to uphold. Indeed, we demean the very Constitution some folks claim they are honoring in their efforts to prove an Obama presidency an illicit affair. We end up doing the very thing to our present opponent that we found so ugly and distasteful over the last few years when we were watching it in reverse.

And no more now than on the playgrounds of our youth will it count for much to say: “He hit me first!”