Mind Siege. (Reviews).

Mind Siege by Tim LaHaye and David Noebel (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2000), 355 pp,; $21,99 cloth

Televangelist Jerry Falwell has said that Tim LaHaye "has set the agenda for evangelicalism more than any other person." LaHaye was a cofounder of Falwell's now defunct Moral Majority organization and is closely tied to Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Over forty-one million of LaHaye's science-fiction-like Left Behind novels and "related products" have been sold. Were it not for his importance as one of the leaders of America's own "Taliban" movement and for his links to such other religio-political right paladins as Falwell, Pat Roberson, David Barton, Bill Bright, Robert Bork, Charles Colson, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Marvin Olasky, and the late Francis Schaeffer, to name but a few, LaHaye's new book Mind Siege--largely a poorly written rehash of stuff he has written before (such as his 1980 The Battle for the Mind)--wouldn't merit serious comment.

Mind Siege is a bizarre, paranoid rant against humanism, which, LaHaye and Noebel hysterically declare, isn't only the "mother" of communism and the supreme evil of the age but also dominates science, public education, the major television networks and newspapers and news magazines, the State Department, "scores" of major foundations, the United Nations, the "left wing of the Democratic Party," as well as Harvard, Yale, and "two thousand other colleges and universities."

Wow! To give the devil his due, so to speak, there is a sense in which a broad spectrum of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and others share many moderate to progressive humanistic values--and that, of course, drives people like LaHaye up the wall.

I should also note that LaHaye lists me as part of the great humanist conspiracy, along with Isaac Asimov, Paul Blanshard, Francis Crick, Lester Mondale, Julian Huxley, Betty Friedan, and myriad others. I am in good company!

An English Composition 101 instructor would probably grade Mind Siege a D. It would take many pages here to list just the stupid errors in the book. In one blunder (p. 199), the book credits Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, with having written the 1947 Everson ruling, which was written by Justice Hugo Black. On the other hand, Joseph Goebbels would probably have given LaHaye a B in Advanced Hate Propaganda 301.

The book scapegoats humanists the way Nazis scapegoated Jews and does so similarly to promote a political agenda. All evil--to hear LaHaye and Noebel tell it--has to do with sex and Darwin. They make no mention of such real world evils as poverty, exploitation, racism, sexism, bigotry, environmental degradation, overpopulation, or crime. The authors' aim, detailed in the latter part of their book after their feverishly frenzied attack on humanism, is to harness conservative churches and pastors (a well-chosen simile) to a political movement to restrict abortion rights, reinstate public school prayer, get fundamentalist creationism into public school science classes, institute vouchers for sectarian and other private schools, clamp down on gays and lesbians, and impose religious tests for political office. Page 271 specifically states: "No humanist is fit to hold public office" (emphasis by the authors).

In short, LaHaye and company seek the dismantling of our priceless arrangement of separation of church and state. They seek nothing less than the Talibanization of the United States.

One example of the book's general silliness is the assertion--after the authors boast about how strong Christianity is in the United States (so strong that chapter nine is entitled "Humanists Control America")--that only 20 percent of Americans are "professing Christians" of whom fewer than 10 percent "possess a Christian worldview." That is fewer than the number of people who have bought LaHaye's books! Go figure.

Edd Doerr is author, coauthor, editor, or translator of twenty books, of which the latest, written with Albert J. Menendez, is The Case Against Charitable Choice.