Christian Masculinity

I am convinced that this generation is more confused about masculinity than any other generation of recent history, maybe of all time. And the fallout of our confusion is crippling us in many ways. Even the well-meaning and religious reaction to the problem is often misguided.

Take for instance the story told recently by a well-meaning Christian author and counselor about a boy, and the trouble this boy encountered one day at school with a bully. The boy’s parents were concerned when their typically talkative son refused to say much of anything around the dinner table that evening. Eventually it came out that a bully at school had pushed their son down and the whole experience had been devastating to him.

The father’s reaction to his son’s discomfort is the point I would like to focus on. He spoke very directly to his son in an understanding yet serious tone and told him that he should hit the bully as hard as he could if that ever happened again.

Not knowing the individuals or the situation very well, I am certainly not in a position to pass judgment on this particular case. The father was concerned that if his son began to shy away from bullies at a young age that it would negatively affect him for the rest of his life. An understanding father should be able to make the right decision at such times.

But the story has bothered me nonetheless. Maybe such pugilistic advice is proper at times but I certainly would never give this kind of instruction to one of my sons (or grandsons). This isn’t to say that I don’t understand where the father in this story is coming from. I have been in a handful of scuffles of my own through the years and would never want my sons to back away from conflict because they lacked courage. But the role of Christian masculinity is quite a bit different than following the Darwinian impulse of male hormones under stress. And I am convinced that this father’s advice is an example of Darwinian masculinity.

Let me explain what I mean. One of the key points of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that in the struggle for existence, success is measured by those individuals that can out-compete their peers in the struggle of having offspring. This is normally seen in nature to mean that the biggest, the strongest or the most cunning males find mates whereas the weaker males do not.

Bullying is a common occurrence in nature and it follows this Darwinian logic. Just watch your dog as it interacts with other dogs, or even with the dominant man in the house. It is used to backing away from the stronger or more dominant male. Nature understands this principle well.

In our societies, however, we tame this Darwinian impulse in a lot of ways. This is largely because we have adopted Christian legal systems and customs. We insist that everyone (including less dominant males) has the right to a successful life. In a social context, we are implying that the winner-take-all logic of a natural bully must not apply to us. And yet if every boy is taught to fight back, the Darwinian argument is fully vindicated. It is the argument that might makes right. This is clearly not what Jesus taught.

In my own experience I have learned how true Jesus’ admonition to Peter (who had just cut off an enemy’s ear with a sword) is, that “they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Jesus never taught men to fight bullies. In fact He insisted that we should not seek “an eye for an eye” but that we should love our enemies. He promised to fight our battles for us.

That said, I have to admit that it isn’t easy overcoming the Darwinian impulse. I have a problem of not suffering bullies gladly. I usually refuse to back down from belligerent people when they confront me even though I am thin boned and am probably not hard to physically beat up. I have come close to injuring myself in traffic because of my Darwinian impulses towards belligerent drivers. And I have gotten into a few tussles on the basketball court for the same reason.

A few years ago I was ejected from a basketball game (and for the entire season, as it turned out) because I tackled a man who was about to punch one of my teammates (who turned out to be my boss at work). I had to miss a number of games (which I felt bad about) but ended up getting a promotion out of the whole thing. 

I might make the argument that standing up for my boss was legitimate (or not). But my behavior in traffic is clearly not a Christian example. It does not demonstrate Christian masculinity, in the least. Sadly, however, this is the sort of response that we are encouraging in our young men when we tell them to hit the bully “as hard as you can”. Christian masculinity is willing to take a hit on the cheek without fighting back. This is not something that the natural man – the Darwinian man – is likely to appreciate. It sounds very much like being a wimp.

But this isn’t the whole story. There are many examples in the gospels showing that Jesus clearly stood up for the weak, the sick and the disadvantaged in general. And we know, as Christian men like to point out, that Jesus was not about backing away from conflict when the need existed – such as cleaning the temple grounds of merchants. Clearly there is a time and a place when a Christian man needs to prepare for battle. 

But the battle must always remain the prerogative of God. The scriptures make it abundantly clear that only a handful of reasons justify an act of war. These include defending our homes and country, contesting both visible and invisible spiritual enemies, and becoming masters of our own selves.

As Christian men, we are expected to protect our wives and children. They have never been asked to defend themselves. In fact, they very often abhor any kind of violence at all and would keep their men and boys (who are becoming men) from fighting at all – strictly as a matter of principle. Christian men need to have the maturity to recognize when it is, and when it is not, the right time to put up a fight.

It is quite interesting how the scriptures handle the issue of preparation. Even though it is expected that men will defend their families and fight for their country, there is no commandment – not even a suggestion – for starting up a program of physical fitness to become powerful warriors.

On the contrary, God is to be relied upon for the needed strength. Whether the battle is between a David and a Goliath or between a handful of Israelites and an invading host, God’s people are protected by Him. He is the warrior in charge. He is the Lord of Hosts and He employs no servant to take His place.

Many years ago, as our family sat around the dinner table, I also had a conversation with my young boys about dealing with bullies. I don’t remember the exact words spoken but I clearly remember that we talked about when it was right for men and boys to stand firm and fight if necessary. We respected the Lord’s teachings about not fighting back. But we also understood that we might need to protect someone weaker than ourselves. Even if the odds were clearly against us, we would put up a fight if needed. Maybe the Lord would give us strength, or maybe we would get beat up in the process. Either way, we would try and be courageous and do what a Christian man is expected to do.

Maybe there are those who believe that backing away from any fight is for women and emasculated men. This is both a myopic and a religiously shallow view. Mortality always wins in the end, at least here below. Even the greatest warrior will succumb to the decaying flesh. The only victory for any of us is victory in Christ.

There are many men that would lose their self-respect if they adopted this Christian kind of masculinity. They could never back down from a fight with dignity. This is because they have never shed themselves of their fallen natures – of their Darwinian natures.

Christian masculinity is of another kind. And it takes practice, and a great deal of self-mastery. It was never meant to deny our genetic drives and inclinations. It only insists that we discipline them for a higher purpose. We, as Christian men, are expected to have the courage to stand firm against danger. But the call to battle is not our call. And if we insist on using our own strength to fight our own battles we will find that, in the end, the weak things of the earth have come out ahead.

Faith and the Best Books

There are millions of books in the world – far too many for anyone to read. Of course, most of what is published is hardly worth spending time with. But even for the comparatively few worthy titles, the list is large – prohibitively large – and it continues to accumulate.  

For Latter-day Saints, this dilemma can take on an added angst. We are, after all, encouraged to find out and read from the best titles and authors we can. “[S]eek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (Doctrine and Covenants 88: 118).

These words to the Prophet Joseph Smith came as an inspired bequest to the members of the new Mormon Church just after Christmas in 1832. The entire revelation came to be called The Olive Leaf that was “plucked from the Tree of Paradise.”

It is a grand ideal, as many ideas from Holy Writ are. But it is also something that many Mormons try to achieve, especially those of us that love reading anyway. The challenge stems from our accumulating choices and from the fact that the original revelation leaves us without a list of what these “best books” might be. In short, we don’t have a final list to work from. For young aspiring Mormon readers, this can be a real limitation.

I have been dealing with this reality for over three decades now, and I am certainly not even close to having an adequate list. Nonetheless, the sheer effort of my reading addiction has yielded a few insights that I offer here to anyone interested. You may not agree with my preferences, but I hope you might be introduced to a few titles – and lists of titles – you might otherwise miss, or discover too late.

But first let me make a difficult admission. It involves something I have occasionally and intentionally ignored through the years. It has to do with the very same verse in the Olive Leaf revelation that I just quoted. It begins by stating, “And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another…” And then this is followed by the injunction to read out of the best books.

As a lover of many kinds of literature, I have wanted the scriptural statement to be a universal call to letters. But this important prefatory line is quite clearly no such thing. On the contrary, it implies that we are to seek out of the best books words of wisdom in order to teach, or to build, faith. Actually, the requirement to study is to help those who lack sufficient faith. What, exactly, this faith is to entail is not stated. It seems to be implied. I believe it must refer to the main sort of knowledge we are to achieve in this life – I mean the knowledge of God. For this is life eternal, the scripture says, “that we might know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent” (John 17: 3).

In other words this bibliotheca (unspecified and open as it is) probably was not meant to include my Tarzan books, the occasional Western novel, or the science thriller habit that I sometimes indulge.

In short, not all books are the same. And the universal virtue of reading in general – the message I picked up from my many school teachers through the years – was not the same virtue that the Olive Leaf revelation proclaimed. Very often I catch myself wanting these two virtues to line up. I want my reading addiction to be scripturally vindicated. I’m sad to say that I don’t think it is. In fact, it really does matter what we read.

That said, I have found a lot of faith-related books through the years. Some of these are written on subjects and by authors you would expect. But I have also found inspiring books in unexpected places.

Take for example my interest in adventure. There are a handful of adventure books for boys that even elementary students love to read – when they will hardly read anything else. This same genre exists for every age group, but especially for the grown-up adventurer (actual or virtual alike). I just discovered, for example, Reader’s Digest’s True Stories of Great Escapes, published in 1977. As a grown man, I still can’t help but love such books. Do these books increase my knowledge of God? Well, not always. But they very often cause me to reflect on the human condition. And a religious person, like me, can find many life lessons here. These stories can ground us to the basic realities of survival in a way that other theoretical works cannot.

Some classic adventure books that I have thoroughly enjoyed are Anapurna by Maurice Herzog, Alive by Piers Paul Read, Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. I could name many others. If you like adventure books, I suggest pulling up the list of titles in The Adventure Library published several years ago. These books with their matching covers are no longer in print. However, many of the titles are still available from other publishers, and most are available as used copies.

But let us move along to other categories. It isn’t healthy to linger in one corner of the candy shop. Many other publishers have collected great books or classics and made them available through the years. Some of these are still in print and can be purchased in installments. Others are available in libraries. And while it is true that all such lists are subjective (and incomplete as a result) they are quite useful as a starting place for great books.   

Perhaps the most ambitious collection is the Britannica Great Books of the Western World project. This collection consists of 54 volumes (most containing more than one book) that begin with Homer and end with Freud. There are many titles in this collection that will not appeal to every reader. They were chosen because of the influence they have had on Western civilization and include books on mathematics, religion, history, literature, etc. Someone wishing to read a classic would do well to glance at the titles in this collection.

And there are many other lists of classics. Some are more academic than others. If you want to find a classic that is also likely to appeal to the general reader, I recommend Reader’s Digest’s The World’s Best Reading. This collection of over a hundred titles includes Dickens, The Bronte sisters, Twain, Douglas, Doyle, etc. The collection is out of print, but used copies can still be found and the list itself is a useful guide.

Easton Press (including the former Franklin Press which it acquired) still makes expensive high quality classics available for the reader that can afford them. And for the reader on a budget – who enjoys owning her own books – the erstwhile Everyman’s Library is another place to look.

I also enjoy the collection of American classics published by the Library of America. This collection now includes over 200 titles and the list continues to grow every year. Some of the authors – especially some of the more modern ones – cannot be considered faith promoting. Some, in fact, should be avoided. But the publishing effort is well worth looking into for good titles.

And then there are the Harvard classics, the Penguin classics, and other lists and volumes. Great books often get included in these lists at some point, at least the ones with staying power. Sadly, however, there are many faith-promoting authors that get over-looked by these lists.

C.S. Lewis is a clear example of a classic Christian author that is rarely anthologized. Even his popular children stories (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series) have had to stand on their own. And then there are classic authors such as John Henry Newman (for the more serious reader), G.K. Chesterton (for all ages), George McDonald (for all ages) and others who are likewise marginalized or forgotten.

There are many great faith-promoting stories for children and young adults. Many of these have become (or should become) classics. Besides books written by the authors mentioned above, I think immediately of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss, The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare, The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and many others.

A good place to look for good titles appealing to young and old alike is the list of Newbery Medal winners. Many great stories have received this award through the years. Books published before 1922 (the first year the award was given) are not included. And other good stories didn’t make the list (like Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight) or are from other countries (like Heidi by Johanna Spyri). But for the beginning home library, the list of Newbery winners is a real aid.

Other awards are also helpful. My son Spencer advised me several years ago of the value of the Pulitzer Prize award for general non-fiction. The Pulitzer Prize is given once a year for American literary excellence in many areas (such as journalism, literature, poetry, photography, history, etc.). These lists include many worthy titles (although many recent winners in the category of literature are clearly not something that Christians will want to read). But the category of general non-fiction, being a bit of a collection for anything that doesn’t fit the other categories, often includes surprises that can be quite valuable.

The list of Parkman Prize winners is another place to find good books. This annual award goes to the best American work of history, but winners are also chosen because of literary excellence. This combination often highlights books that deal with important but challenging themes that are also written well enough to be quite accessible to an interested general reader. The History Book Club has reprinted over a dozen of the best of thesse winners and made them available in inexpensive copies (although not all of them are still in print).

Literary excellence, I need to add, is only a nice addition in the search for faith-promoting literature. It is not a necessary corollary. In fact, it can often lead to trouble. In the long aisles of fictional volumes that fill libraries and bookstores, most titles are of no value whatsoever in our search for God. In fact very many of them are quite offensive.

For this reason I cannot recommend a list of prize-wining novels for faith-seeking Christians. Several titles show up in the above lists, but I have only been frustrated in my efforts to find faith-promoting titles from lists of literary prize winners. I should qualify this by admitting that prize winners from earlier decades are often worthwhile – and frequently safe. More recent titles are frequently disappointing.

Of course there are Christian literary awards. And you may find these helpful. My experience, however, is that these awards are usually fairly parochial, and most winners have not been shown to have any real staying power. We really need a quality book award for excellence in virtuous literature. We could also use a Christian book review service – maybe something that provides ratings like the motion picture industry has developed. It can be quite frustrating to spend money on a book that looks interesting (even a book with good reviews) only to find that it is too offensive to read.

Finally, there is the trustworthy category of authors and books cited by general authorities in General Conference talks (the 2-day conferences held by the Mormon Church twice a year) and in their own publications. I have come to appreciate this little-recognized category more and more through the years. Many conference speakers are well-read men and women who are also individuals of faith. And while the vast majority of their sources come from the standard works of the church, other church authors and previous conference addresses, many speakers also draw from the authors of the world in their search for faithful literature.

The availability of conference talks (including citations) on the official Church website (www.lds.org) going back to 1971 is a valuable resource for discovering who these authors are.  By far the most frequently cited non-LDS sources are dictionaries, newspapers and news magazines. Many speakers also draw from their own professional sources such as legal documents (among the several layers) and medical journals (among the doctors and surgeons). But, for the most part, popular authors are more frequently referred to.

The two most popular ones are C.S. Lewis and William Shakespeare. Those of us that listen regularly to conference will not be surprised by this. Some poets are also frequently cited. Wordsworth and Tennyson lead the list but Kipling, Frost, Pope, Browning, Longfellow, Guest, Yeats, Milton, Whittier, Markham and others are also important.

Among other religious writers (besides C.S. Lewis) Farrar is important (primarily The Life of Christ) but so is G.K. Chesterton and H.E. Fosdick. In Children’s literature, Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan) are understandably important but so is Antione Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince). 

Authors such as Dickens, Donne, Hugo, and (Joseph) Stein (for Fiddler on the Roof) are important. World leaders, critics and historians are also cited. Important names include Lincoln, Jefferson, Carlyle, Churchill, (William) James, (Will and Ariel) Durant, etc. 

Occasionally an author is cited that is less expected or is no longer popular (and probably deserves more attention). Corrie ten Boom and Lloyd Douglas come to mind. But also Anne Lindbergh, J.E. McCulloch (for Home: the Savior of Civilization), Barbara Tuchman, etc.

It is always refreshing for me to hear a church leader draw from great literature to build faith. This, of course, is what the Olive Leaf is asking us to do. It is also a reminder to me that great books should fill a couple of different roles. Aristotle (in his Nicomachean Ethics) taught us about primary and secondary goods. A primary good is something that is good in and of itself, like health or virtue. A secondary good is something that helps us acquire a primary good, like a job or an instrument or tool.

Some things fall into both categories. Food, for instance, can be enjoyed just for what it is. It can also help us live healthy lives or fuel our virtuous deeds. Books too can be both primary and secondary goods. Few things are more enjoyable to me than spending a couple of hours with a well-made book by an inspired author.

Of course, the literature of faith does not deny us this literary good. But it does require us to realize that as means of bringing us to God, great books are secondary goods. It is faith that is the primary good.

I think we instinctively know this. It is during those moments when we put the book aside, reflecting on important things, that we find ourselves truly lifted. These moments can be some of the greatest moments of life. That we associate them with books is natural and inevitable. It is often a book that is the catalyst that leads us to God.

And this, perhaps, is where books achieve their highest value. Faith is the motivating influence of all of our intentions. This is one of the great teachings of Joseph Smith in Lectures on Faith. But where does this desire come from in the first place? Alma taught that a beginning to faith can be nurtured even from a small seed if we will but give it place in our hearts (see Alma Chapter 32, in The Book of Mormon). Very few things are more capable than great books for planting this desire.

Of course, other kinds of books can do just the opposite. We need to help each other make this important distinction and find the truly great books. For many of us – especially children – our faith depends on it.

The Golden Door Before Columbus, A Review of Who Discovered America? by Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson

At the end of her famous sonnet The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus describes the Statue of Liberty as “A mighty woman with a torch”. And it is she that “cries with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!””.

For longer than America has been a nation, she has been the recipient of travelers from all over the world. The first to arrive since Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera were primarily Europeans. Soon, however, the “open door” would receive peoples from all lands looking for a better life. For many of our ancestors she has always been the “land of opportunity”.

We know this story fairly well. We have been recording it for a long time. Its history is written in diaries, sermons and legal documents that hail from the very earliest European settlements. But America’s history is much older than a few hundred years. And we have learned a great deal about this older history over the last several generations. Much of this knowledge has come from the efforts of anthropologists, archaeologists, epigraphers, and many other interested persons.

Today we are experiencing another enlargement of our understanding. Once considered to be largely a closed book, the stories of America’s ancient founders are slowly coming to light. It has been the work of many decades and we are finding ourselves at the point of a significant synthesis. The veil of genetic relationships is starting to be peeled back just as a generation ago gained tools for dating ancient relics. These advances, together with a greater availability and synthesis of literature regarding artifacts, monuments and glyphs, have made for a shift in our understanding. We are beginning to appreciate just how ancient the “golden door” truly was.

This shift has come primarily from the realization that ancient peoples navigated the oceans to a greater degree than we gave them credit for. In hindsight, it seems rather arrogant of us not to have recognized this before. The evidence hasn’t been entirely lacking. Our problem seems to have been a culturally imposed historical myopia – a myopia that developed with the modern age.

Interest in the scientific study of cultural origins is largely a post-Victorian effort. European imperialism opened our eyes to the diversity of ancient cultures and it did so at a time when the study of origins was sweeping academic halls throughout our Western universities.

We are shocked today at the naiveté of these early evolutionary anthropologists who proposed (and occasionally implemented) eugenic practices. And we recoil at the ideas of cultural evolution that largely justified so many crimes against humanity during the two World Wars. But these errors also manifest themselves in lesser, more subtle ways. In the study of ancient history they have led us to believe ancient cultures were all very primitive and that we moderns have been the only sophisticated ones.

One of these mental errors that we still frequently make is the error referred to as “the single colonization myth”. This is the misguided notion that ancient cultures (usually established across oceans and often facilitated via oceanic navigation) are best explained by single colonization events. Many of these arguments attempt to show the similarities between a New World object, species or trait and an Old World correlate. Because these trans-oceanic arguments have been academically marginalized in the past, most arguments have tended to be conservative and sometimes tentative. And as a result, ancient colonies are explained by single colonization events almost as tacit admissions that they are so uncommon that only a single event makes sense.

But things have changed – at least in our understanding of early America – and we are starting to recognize the cultural diversity that existed here long before 1492. And we are starting to see that America was colonized anciently by more than one group. We will probably never know the precise number but it must certainly be more than just a few.

A good example of this change in understanding is Gavin Menzies’s and Ian Hudson’s recent book Who Discovered America?. This is Menzies’s fourth book dealing with pre-Columbian cultures and colonization. And his primary focus is to show the extent of China’s maritime exploration before Columbus. In his first book 1421, Menzies argued that a Chinese fleet under the direction of Admiral Zheng He sailed from China and discovered many lands, including America several decades before Europeans did so. In Who Discovered America?, the authors continue this argument and bring up several more lines of evidence that have come to their attention since the earlier publication. This evidence is interesting to say the least and the authors are to be congratulated for shedding light on a largely forgotten chapter in the history of exploration.

These books, however, have not freed themselves from the single colonization myth. One gets the sense, after reading them that no influence was of much significance in the New World except that of the ancient Chinese. This is a shame. The authors would stand to gain a great deal from aligning themselves within the larger context of recent research. Instead, they carry on the tradition of so many previous writers that have argued for only a single major influence in the New World. Ultimately, the importance of Menzies’s work will be as a chapter in this larger understanding. While it is true that Chinese artifacts and influences can be seen in ancient America, it is also clear that other influences were present. Let me give an example of what I mean.

The Olmecs of ancient Central America were one of the earliest peoples in the New World to leave behind a significant record in stone – enabling us to get a glimpse of their world. Menzies and Hudson point out the recent findings of Mike Xu that many Olmec glyphs show significant similarities to Shang era characters from China. This is an important finding that needs to be better understood. But it also needs to be clarified that the Olmec connection to Shang, China is not new with Mike Xu, as Menzies and Hudson suggest. Betty Meggers pointed this out several years ago in an article she wrote for the American Anthropologist based on jade artifacts uncovered at La Venta[i].

Unfortunately, one gets the impression in chapters 7 and 8 of Who Discovered America? that the Chinese were the only influence on Olmec civilization. This is the same sort of mistake that earlier authors have made but for different cultural influences. For example Ivan Van Sertima in his book They Came Before Columbus argues that Olmec civilization was a product of African colonization. This makes more immediate sense than does a Chinese colonization if one goes simply on the evidence of stone monuments from Olmec sites (pictures of which are absent in Who Discovered America?). Many of these monuments are clearly African in appearance.

Or consider Geoffrey Ashe’s argument in Land to the West, that Olmec glyphs clearly show a European influence. His evidence is the well-known basalt stele from La Venta (Mexico) showing the “Uncle Sam” profile of a man with a long beard and aquiline nose.

I am not trying to minimize the importance of any of these findings. On the contrary, I find them all very important. My point is that we are building enough evidence now to form a more complete view of ancient America – in this case of Olmec civilization – and that arguments of single colonization events are no longer enough. Menzies and Hudson have popularized research about a Chinese influence. What we need now is a better story about how Africans, Europeans (or perhaps Mediterranean peoples) and Chinese were interacting in the Americas – all in the same area at about the same time. This work has yet to be undertaken.

Another line of evidence used by the authors is DNA, or genetic, evidence. Menzies and Hudson have sifted through a growing body of literature to show that some Native American populations have as much as 40% of their genetic material similar to Asian peoples. The authors suggest in one instance that this similarity may be as high as 96%.

This can be misleading without a little background in genetic evidence. Let me start with the evidence from maternal (mitochondrial) DNA studies. The authors correctly show that both Asians and Native Americans have A, B, C, and D genetic markers (or haplogroups). The temptation when seeing these similarities is to assume a parental relationship. But the similarity of these haplogroups does not establish this. What it suggests is that some of the peoples of Asia and America share a common ancestry. And it suggests that the common ancestry had these same haplogroups.

This, perhaps simple, distinction becomes important when one considers the antiquity of American groups and the realization that early American remains do not fall neatly into established “Asian” and “American” types. The famous Kennewick Man, for example, was an ancient American (uncovered in the Columbia River drainage of the Pacific Northwest) that shows many anatomical features more likely European or Mediterranean than Asian. Did this individual also have A, B, C, and D haplogroups. We will probably never know but it seems likely.

Realistically, the DNA evidence doesn’t really help Menzies’s and Hudson’s argument for a Medieval Chinese discovery of America. The relationships are just as easily explained by the standard argument of contact via the Beringian land bridge. 

There is other conflicting genetic evidence that is only partially mentioned by the authors such as that coming from male (Y chromosome) DNA studies. DNA haplogroup Q does, in fact, show similarities between Asia and America (as mentioned by the authors) but other groups in Greenland and the Middle East do too. The R1 haplogroup (not mentioned by the authors) which shows up frequently in Native Americans from eastern North America also shows up frequently in the Middle East and Europe.

And importantly, a presence of Asian haplogroups in modern Native Americans does not clearly establish what this means demographically. For example, a landing of a few Asian men in a culture with a few nubile girls – assuming reproductive success in their descendants – could easily account for the presence of Asian markers in most of the people making up that culture in later generations, even though only a few Asian immigrants actually settled initially. This sort of thing is what geneticists refer to as a bottleneck and it is a well-established phenomenon. Claims that a high percentage of Asian markers proves an exclusive (or near exclusive) genetic relationship (including many large colonizing fleets) is stretching what we can know from these findings.

On another topic, Menzies and Hudson uncover a bit of evidence that is quite interesting. It involves the research of Jerry Warsing on Machado-Joseph disease. This is a congenital disease that exists in Yunnan China as well as among some Native Americans of Eastern North America. Warsing has evidence that the disease existed in America before the Portuguese (having picked it up in China) could have brought it to America. This deserves to be looked at more closely. One possible explanation might be that the Portuguese brought the disease to the Azores from which it was taken to America quite early in the 16^th Century. But it may also be a real bit of evidence of a Chinese presence in pre-Columbian America.

Another interesting part of the book is the travel narratives given by Menzies. These show up in a couple of the chapters and are, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the book. In fact I wish that more time had been spent discussing these trips, especially the museum and archaeological stops in Asia Minor. Some of the conclusions drawn from these trips are difficult to accept outright, but they need further exploration. If Menzies and Hudson are right, it will change a good deal about how we see the ancient world.

For example, one of Menzies’s trips involves the retracing of the Silk Road. He does so in order to discount the importance of this ancient highway connecting Asia and the Middle East. This denial is then used to bolster the importance of Chinese seafaring as an alternative means of exploration and trade. Menzies, after only giving brief details of his various stops, comes to what he calls the end of the Silk Road at a place called Jiayuguan. He then claims that the extension of the ancient Silk Road beyond this point is dubious.

For anyone the least bit interested in the Silk Road, this denial of a complete land route between the Middle East and Asia will come as a bit of a shock. There is a vast literature and substantial archaeological evidence establishing its existence and its extent. That the authors can so summarily dismiss this significant body of evidence is unfortunate.

The authors might instead have looked more closely at the maritime silk route which is becoming better understood in recent decades. This route extends along a handful of coastal cities extending from southern China around India and to Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Menzies is well aware of this route. He has contributed to our understanding of it in his previous books. Significantly, the maritime route is one of the least controversial parts of his Chinese paradigm and it doesn’t need to be bolstered by denying the importance of the overland routes.   

If Menzies has a better argument for downplaying the overland route, I would like to see an enlargement of his claims. Such an effort would need to draw upon the extensive literature already available and include more firsthand knowledge of Asian geography (which he has already started).

More plausible are the arguments Menzies and Hudson make about the importance of early seafaring in the Mediterranean. Here there is a growing body of evidence that aligns nicely with the authors’ claims that ancient seafaring was more widespread than we used to think.

In Chapter 5 (Mastery of the Oceans Before Columbus) the authors reproduce four Minoan seals showing ancient watercraft. Their conclusion is fairly straightforward: this kind of evidence establishes the fact that early man could have ventured into the Ocean. And by extension, the Chinese could subsequently have done so as well.

I would like to add a little bit to this view, however. The Minoan seals do, in fact, establish a very early Mediterranean maritime tradition. But they do more than that. They also suggest that this tradition may have been established in Egypt before it was established in Crete. This is important because there is evidence that ancient Egyptians made it to America before Columbus – and probably before the Chinese.

Menzies and Hudson argue that the Minoan vessels would have been made of cedar and oak. I would argue differently, that they show evidence of being made by reeds – or at least that they are shaped in a way that was established by reed predecessors.

The Minoan seals show a concave shape of the hulls with ropes that extend from the center to the ends of the ship. Thor Heyerdahl argued many years ago that this is the required infrastructure for reed boats. Such watercrafts are made by bundling together hundreds of dried reeds. These bundles are themselves tied together in even larger bundles and secured together to form the base of the boat.

A corollary of this form of vessel is that the ends tend to taper off and are less strong in open seas – tending to fall apart. To avoid this, ancient ship builders devised the method of strengthening the ship ends by securing them to a rope extending from a pole or structure in the middle of the craft. This arrangement also tends to give the vessel a concave shape. This is all quite apparent in these seals. For a full account see Heyerdahl’s book Ancient Man and the Ocean.

In recent years, new evidence has emerged to make this Egyptian presence in America seem likely. Svetla Balabanova discovered a few years ago that New World cocaine and nicotine are present in some Egyptian mummies. And it has been known for some time that interesting similarities exist between Micmac writings, the Davenport Stele, and other New World inscriptions and Egyptian hieroglyphs. So, while I agree with the conclusion dawn by Menzies and Hudson (that the Minoan seals are evidence of early maritime activity) I also think that this evidence should be seen in the larger context of multiple colonization events in Ancient America.  

Finally, I would like to comment briefly on the more controversial pre-Columbian Chinese map that Menzies and Hudson have uncovered showing essentially the entire continent of North America. This map, discovered by a Chinese lawyer Liu Gang (and subsequently named the Liu Gang Map), is a dual hemisphere map showing the Old World in the left hemisphere and the New World in the right.

The map is claimed to have been made in either 1417 or 1418 and shows both North and South America in clear outline with the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and the Panamanian isthmus of Central America also clearly defined. Menzies and Hudson claim that this map is evidence of the large fleets of discovery sent from China in the early 15^th Century, and particularly of the fleet under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He.

Of all the claims in Who Discovered America?, this map has received the sharpest comments from critics.  Important points such as: the lack of a Chinese cartographic tradition of dual-hemisphere maps, apparent copying from earlier maps (for example the copying of California as an island which mistake is hard to see duplicated on a voyage of discovery coming from China), the poor quality of representation of Chinese landmarks, etc.

I am also surprised that North America’s largest river system (the Missouri / Mississippi River) is either missing or shown to empty into the Atlantic Ocean. The Amazon River is also missing from South America, although other details seem to be correct.

Liu Gang says that he bought the map from a Shanghai dealer in 2001 for $500. He is also reported to have understood the importance of the find after learning of Menzies’s book 1421. As things stand now, the map is not being taken seriously by scholars. In a jumble of inconsistent accounts, it is generally dismissed as a forgery.

I think this is a mistake. I do not doubt that it is being unwisely sold as evidence for Zheng He’s “discovery” of America. Yet the map does appear to be fairly old, perhaps made in the 18^th Century. And it still remains to be seen what the story behind its production will turn out to be, if this can ever be known. Perhaps it represents nothing more than an early Chinese interest in global issues during the age of discovery. It would be interesting to find out more about it.

Sadly, though, the sensational claims of Menzies’s books make this unlikely. Critics, it seems, come to the same all-or-nothing conclusions on these issues just as Menzies and Hudson do on the peopling of the New World. If anything is unbelievable then everything must be unbelievable. I would argue that Menzies and Hudson should not be expected to master and fairly evaluate the bulk of accumulating diffusionist evidence. Nor should they be expected to be experts in antique maps. They have never been trained to be (and they never claim that they have).

In fairness, they have popularized something that scholars have guardedly accepted for some time. I mean that there is evidence that the Chinese were present at some level in the New World before Columbus. The correct path forward is to learn just how important this presence actually was. Clearly, many of the claims made by Menzies and Hudson are misplaced. But the fact remains that we don’t know exactly just how extensive the Chinese presence was. And certainly the interested amateur should have a voice in this debate.

I would hope that someone with experience in ancient maps would look more closely at the Liu Gang Map. The first thing we need to know is if its age can be determined by a group of credible labs. It also needs to be looked at by calligraphers. If it isn’t a modern forgery than we need to know why such a map exists – with all its atypical properties. Given the fact that there does seem to have been a Chinese presence in America before Columbus, a better knowledge of what was happening In China at this time would be worthwhile.

Times really are changing in our understanding of the ancient world. Just within the last year we have seen a prominent genetic confirmation, in America’s premier scientific journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and confirmed in the British journal Nature) of the transfer of the sweet potato from the Americas to Oceania before Columbus. And Alan de Queiroz of the University of Nevada, Reno has recently published a book showing (among other things) the importance of trans-oceanic dispersal events in the history of life – even establishing the surprising fact that New World monkeys probably made it across the Atlantic Ocean instead of travelling via the Beringian land bridge as previously thought.

This changing academic environment is opening up a whole new perspective on pre-Columbian cultural exchanges. And it is worthwhile reading Who Discovered America? within this broader context. It is easy enough to find implausible arguments in a popular book like this. We would do better to see what more might be added to, or subtracted from, the authors’ arguments and find out where they just might be right.

References

The phrase “The Single Colonization Myth”  is introduced in my article from the Winter 2012 issue of the NEARA Journal “Bearded Polynesians and the Single Colonization Myth”, Volume 46(2): 4-9. Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson. 2013, Who Discovered America? The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas. William Morrow, 308 pp. Menzies’s three previous books include: 1421, The Year China Discovered America (William Morrow, 2002); 1434, The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (William Morrow, 2008); and The Lost Empire of Atlantis (William Morrow, 2011).  On the Chinese influence in La Venta, see Xu, H. Mike. 1996. Origin of the Olmec Civilization. Edmond: University of Central Oklahoma Press. Betty Meggers’s research, The Transpacific origin of Mesoamerican Civilization: A Preliminary Review of the Evidence and Its Theoretical Implications, was published in  American Anthropologist 77: 1-27 (1975).  On the African presence in La Venta see Ivan Van Sertima. 1976. They Came Before Columbus, The African Presence in Ancient America. Random House, New York. On the European presence, see  Geoffrey Ashe’s book Land to the West, St. Brendan’s Voyage to America. The Viking Press, New York (1962). See page 222 for the discussion of the Olmec stele – which is figured opposite of page 209. See Ancient Encounters, Kennewick Man and the First Americans by James C. Chatters published by Simon and Schuster in 2001 for information on Kennewick Man. The Y Chromosome Consortium’s 2002 article A Nomenclature System for the Tree of Human Y-Chromosomal Binary Haplogroups.  Genome Research 12 (2): 339–348, is my source of male inheritance. For a beginning list of important references on the Silk Road see the Wikipedia article, Silk Rode (Accessed 2/28/14).  Heyerdahl, Thor (1979) Early Man and the Ocean. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, points out the sea-worthy nature of early Egyptian reed boats. Wells, Samuel A. 2000. American drugs in Egyptian mummies: a review of the evidence. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm. (Accessed 3/4/14.) is my review of the Balabanova research. See Geoff Wade’s challenge to the Liu Gang map at www.1421exposed.com/html/wade_challenge.html for an earlier critique. (Accessed 3/4/14.) See also Stefan Lovgren’s article “Chinese Columbus” Map Likely Fake, Experts Say, in the January 23, 2006 post on nationalgeographicnews.com. (Accessed 3/4/14.) On the recent sweet potato findings see Roullier, Caroline et al. (2013). Historic collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 110(6): 2205-2210.  And on the recent changes in animal dispersal attitudes see De Queiroz, Alan (2014) The Monkey’s Voyage, How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life. Basic Books, New York.

The Liu Gang map was kindly provided by Ian Hudson and is used here by permission.

Voyaging

Sometimes you have to gather

Truth in fairy nets

That swing through windless

Fathoms of the brain

Or catch a dream with

Feathers on a string

To quench our willful

Heritage of pain

But then there comes

A time to start again,

To act upon those

Windows of the deep

However far the flotsam

May remain

And fix the stranded

Wreckage of our keep

Faith and the Duke Experiments in ESP

Many of us occasionally intuit things that our normal senses fail to register. My first guess that this was a real possibility came when I was in junior high school. I was at that awkward stage in life when I started noticing girls and feeling very self-conscious. It was also a time that I became aware of many things I had ignored before.

One behavioral change that was quite common among my peers was the game of sneaking looks at cute girls. This was a game that I was too shy to participate in for the most part, although privately I did notice a couple of girls that I secretly liked.

It was at this impressionable time that I developed the odd notion that some of these girls could tell when I was looking at them even when it seemed that they couldn’t see me. I decided that they must have better peripheral vision than I had, although this didn’t explain the cases that involved looking completely in the opposite direction. I found it a bit ironic when, a few years later, a girl named Lisa (whom I admired) was in charge of testing peripheral vision and blind spots for a driver education class. I unreasonably assumed she had been given the job because of her feminine expertise.

I’m still a bit undecided on this issue. But I’m half convinced that women do have a better sense of being watched than men do. I hear them commenting on such things occasionally. Men almost never do. Of course such ability, if it is real, would be classified as paranormal. And in recent decades, the paranormal has been pretty much banished from serious discourse.

This is too bad. Some varieties of what has been called extra-sensory perception (or ESP) have been fairly convincingly established – like the ability to sense the image on a card without seeing it (sometimes called clairvoyance) or of the ability to detect what someone else is thinking or concentrating on (sometimes called telepathy). Other claims are a bit more sensational and not well established – like the ability to predict the stock market. Overall, it’s a shame that we aren’t paying more academic attention to these sorts of things. They used to be a lot more popular.

Both the US and Soviet military spent resources on paranormal studies – as did the Nazis. And between the two World Wars, it actually became somewhat respectable for universities to support these kinds of studies too.

Perhaps the most famous were the Duke Experiments conducted by Joseph Banks (J.B.) Rhine, a botanist who took up paranormal studies at Duke University. He became interested in the possibility of measuring paranormal activity after being impressed by comments made by Arthur Conan Doyle. Rhine ended up spending several years and much of his career studying clairvoyance. He categorized his area of study as a branch of abnormal psychology.

Based on his findings, Rhine claimed that 1 person in 5 had some extra-sensory ability. Sometimes gifted persons were aware of their abilities. Very often, however, they were not. Sometimes students would come to his lab to be tested and discover their ability for the first time using a simple card test that Rhine had developed. It was a fairly straightforward test using a deck of 25 cards. These cards consisted of 5 cards each of 5 different shapes (star, plus sign, square, circle, and wavy lines). Subjects were then asked to intuit the face of the card without seeing it. A purely random score would be 5 correct out of the 25 cards (a score that could be easily made if someone chose the same shape all 25 times, for example). Rhine then calculated the significance of the scores based on the number correct above 5 and the number of tests conducted for each subject.

Over the period of several years, Rhine studied hundreds of subjects. A handful of these were particularly gifted and averaged scores well above 5. In some cases correct runs of over 10 in a row were recorded. On three occasions, scores of 25 correct (out of 25) were reported – representing odds astronomically improbable.

Rhine’s recounting of these studies makes for fascinating reading. And for me, with an abiding interest in the religious principle of faith, I find a couple of things similar between them – I mean that faith and ESP have some things in common. I also see a couple of things that are quite (and importantly) different between them.

The first and most obvious similarity between ESP and faith is the importance of optimism. This is what Rhine has to say on the matter: “The better the investigator can communicate a wholehearted enthusiasm, confidence, and encouragement to the subjects, the better are his chances of success.”

Very often Rhine would test a subject who would record high scores at first and then, as the tedium of the studies wore on, would eventually record scores no better than random hits (close to a score of an even 5). Very few subjects could maintain high scores over the period of months and years. It wasn’t always easy to keep a subject’s confidence up. I am reminded of Peter’s initial effort at walking on water towards Jesus. Astonishingly, he succeeded at first and then he sank.

I believe that this principle of optimism, or confidence, also held true for the evaluators – even true for Rhine himself. This is suggested by the fact that these Duke studies often yielded successful results that other institutions were unable to duplicate. Over time this changed and Rhine’s successes were achieved by many other institutions and individuals. But among those that were successful there seems to have been an element of optimism in the validity of the studies.

One of the benefits of using Rhine’s ESP cards is that it is not an all-or-nothing test of clairvoyance. Subjects can score a card incorrectly and still get an indication of extra-sensory ability from the overall score. And as each subject is not told of the correctness of her “guesses” until the end of each run, there is little pressure in having to establish or maintain a sensational effort.

That said, there were only a few cases recorded where subjects were able to record more than just 5 or 6 correct in a row. It is easy to see why if you look at the odds. If a subject has a 1 in 5 chance of scoring each card correct (since there are 5 shapes to choose from), then the odds of getting 5 right in a row is a simple calculation of 1 in 5 multiplied 5 times. Or in other words the odds are 1 in 3,625 of getting a run of 5 in a row correct due just to chance. Or put another way, a subject without ESP ability would be expected to get 5 correct in a row only once every 3,625 tries.

Getting a run correct beyond this becomes exponentially less likely for every try. Even so, it wasn’t rare for a gifted subject to get a spectacular run on occasion – even a nearly impossible run. Yet, no matter how gifted the subject was, these unusual events could never be predicted or controlled.

For someone with a religious frame of mind, it’s easy to see the similarities between this truth and the principle of faith in the efficacy of prayer. Many people, like me, have great faith in prayer even though we don’t always see the hand of God in our lives. Sometimes our Heavenly Father seems to want us to handle things the best we can on our own. At other times, answers come in remarkable ways.

Just recently I found myself confronted with a small crisis in one of my research projects at work. I wanted to see if a molecule extracted from a particular bacterium could protect a plant from pests. Unfortunately, the day was windy and I was having trouble getting the solution where I needed it to be on the plants. So I decided I needed a bit of help from Mother Nature’s boss, and I said a prayer. Needless to say, the wind stopped and I was able to conduct my experiment.

These kinds of answers to prayers are not uncommon for me. As I look back on them, I realize that they are fairly insignificant from a certain historic or global perspective, but they are definitely important to me. And yet, it often happens that my prayers for much bigger issues seem to go unresolved.

Through the years, Kathy and I have often prayed for our handicapped daughter Alicia. Over time, though, our prayers have changed. We used to ask for her epilepsy and mental handicap to be fixed. Yet we never saw any significant change because of these prayers. We now pray for Alicia’s general well-being and for our own personal strength to help her. These prayers have a much higher success rate.  It is clear to us, that we can’t control how our prayers are answered any more than we can guarantee a successful “guess” in an ESP experiment. It seems clear that there are some things that we are not made (or meant) to understand with precision.

Another image stuck me as quite interesting in Rhine’s story. It involved research by Hans Bender at the University of Bonn in 1933. Dr. Bender had discovered a young woman (a graduate student) with extra-sensory gifts and he subjected her to several tests. Bender used different methods than Rhine. His cards consisted of letters instead of shapes. This woman also showed an ability to draw shapes of objects she could not see – shapes that an observer had identified. Her drawings were not always exactly like the image, but the overall similarities were unmistakable.

This study is quite similar to a series of studies that the American author Upton Sinclair did with his wife back in the 1920’s. Sinclair’s wife was known to have telepathic abilities and would frequently demonstrate them to her husband who ended up writing a book about their experiments together. This book Mental Radio is full of the drawings of these experiments which consisted primarily of Sinclair drawing a random object (often something that he would find in a magazine or around the house) that he would then concentrate on. His wife, in another room, would then try to draw the same object by concentrating on what she thought Sinclair had in mind.

According to their own calculation, about a fourth of the attempts were quite good and impressively accurate. Several of them are illustrated in the book – including a six pointed star, a kitchen fork, a bird’s nest, etc. About half of the attempts were not extremely clear but similarities were noticeable – for example a shrub would have lines and circles similar to branches and leaves. And about a fourth of the attempts showed no similarity at all.

Sinclair did not know how to statistically evaluate the probabilities of these similarities. In fact, I’m not sure that statisticians today would be up to the task. How do you calculate the odds of drawing a random object out of countless possibilities? Clearly the odds of drawing a fourth of the objects correctly are extremely low and not due to chance.

But what about the many drawings that are only somewhat alike? Dr. Bender described some of these efforts as similar to object that you or I might see through dim light. There is a shadowy kind of similarity but crisp details and outlines are missing.

Consider this finding with the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly…” This remarkable image is the Apostle’s description of how we perceive Heavenly things in a fallen and imperfect world. It comes at the end of his magisterial treatment of charity and the gifts of the spirit. It comes just before his statement that, “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three…”

Faith isn’t a perfect knowledge of things. Sometimes we only get a glimpse, or a hint, or a suspicion. The outlines aren’t clear and yet we proceed. We were made to live much of our lives this way. We are not mere calculating machines that have to mechanically estimate probabilities or be completely convinced by logical certainty. We are beings that make many of our decisions on imperfect information. We make our best guess. We are forced to “see through a glass darkly”.

What makes this image particularly arresting is that in all probability, Paul is referring here to an early Jewish equivalent of a crystal ball or magic mirror. I know this may sound sacrilegious to some Christians but let me explain.

An important element among those that have extra-sensory gifts is the ability to dilute the sensory overload that normally exists all around us. The sights, sounds, odors, etc. that fill our world keep us focused on our immediate surroundings. Individuals that claim to be able to access things beyond these senses very often have to put themselves in a trance-like state to be more effective.

Various ways have been devised by mystics through the years to do this. Sometimes random ink blots on paper have been used. Sometimes gazing into an opaque glass or a crystal ball has been effective. At other times, forms of mirrors have been used.

These sorts of things, oddly enough, do show up in the Bible. Saul is known to have visited a type of soothsayer and the Book of Revelation contains references to magical stones and seals, etc. For our purposes, two Biblical references are particularly noteworthy. In the 44^th chapter of Genesis, Joseph has a favorite (and presumably expensive) cup secretly placed in his brother Benjamin’s bag. He does this in order to accuse him later of theft which will enable him to stay longer with Joseph who at this point has not revealed his own true identity. The account indicates that this cup is used by Joseph for drinking and for divining. And in fact it is an example of a well-known type of vision aid with ties to magic mirrors. In this case a silver cup is filled with water which acts as a kind of mirror.

Another reference is our account of Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. His statement of “seeing through a glass darkly,” is very likely a reference to gazing at various forms of glass as a visionary aid. This is what Professor Tenhaeff from the State University of Utrecht wrote about some of these kinds of attempts by clairvoyants to reduce sensory inputs: “Some subjects attempt to achieve a lowered level of consciousness by means of a crystal ball or a piece of glass… The use of the magic mirror to achieve a state of diminishing inhibitions and to stimulate the manifestation of paragnostic powers is mentioned repeatedly, not only in the ethnological literature but also by classical authors and those of the Middle Ages.”

Not only is Paul’s image of darkened glass appropriate as a metaphor for life and faith, it is likely a description of how he knew others to be looking for answers. I find this to be an impressive truth. To this day, over eight decades since the Duke Experiments have been conducted, the results of Dr. Rhine’s experiments are essentially ignored by the academy. And yet the best criticisms never take his rigorous testing methods seriously. For those of us (perhaps the 1 in 5) that have experienced paranormal things, this is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that the very fundamental principle of religious faith is also questioned by the same academy.

I don’t mean that every associate professor lacks faith or never succumbs to mystical hunches now and then. But the fact remains, that we cannot manipulate or control either faith or extra-sensory perception. And because of this, very few scholars are willing to bet their careers on such things.

Among religious believers, too, there is a hesitancy to acknowledge the existence of ESP. Part of this hesitancy may be due to ignorance of its similarities to faith. Other reasons are, I think, a little more fundamental. In particular, the historic relationship between organized religion (specifically Christianity) and the paranormal has often been strained.

This Christian history extends back to the very beginning when many of the Roman mystery religions practiced mystical rituals that were unacceptable to the early followers of Jesus. Later in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, it was the purveyors of the magic world view that often found them at odds with the established church.

Our ancestors living at this time made a real distinction between dark magic and white magic. The former was of the Devil. The latter included things like angels, deceased saints and miracles. But the distinction between dark and white magic was not always clear. There was a broad area of overlap that included such things as talismans, fortune-telling, dowsing, etc., Many Christians – especially rural congregations – lived in this area of overlap. These Christians were very often comfortable with ideas such as hunches and dreams – experiences that they were familiar with and that wouldn’t have been too different from certain kinds of clairvoyance and telepathy.

Today most Christians live in a scientifically informed culture that leaves us suspicious of both black and white magic. Not only do we wink at the thought of devils and angels but we dismiss the more commonly experienced manifestations of ESP. It isn’t scientifically or religiously acknowledged.

This is in a way a limiting development. It puts us outside of our heritage.We are no longer shackled by credulity and are not nearly as gullible as our ancestors must have been. Or so we imagine. 

And in at least one sense, we are probably more grounded doctrinally too. ESP is not a principle that leads anyone necessarily to God. Rhine worked at a respected institution founded by Methodists and Quakers (Duke University) but he became interested in clairvoyance from Arthur Conan Doyle. And Doyle was known to have often been critical of organized religion and of religious faith.

During recent decades, if you were to have patronized bookstores with large New Age holdings (a common occurrence, I might add), you would have noticed that titles dealing with ESP were stacked right next to titles dealing with black magic. This is fairly revealing. The people buying books on ESP were more likely to be interested in witches than in a Heavenly Father.

If former Christians would have been comfortable discussing telepathy and dreams after church – or buying a related book at their local Christian bookstore – modern Christians prefer talking about technology while leaving anything smacking of mysticism to the cultural underground. And while it might be doctrinally safer to separate these two worlds, it is also true that we are probably missing out on a very human – and a very Christian – part of our natures.   

There is no need to be ashamed of this. We were made to exercise faith and to act on hunches – even, dare I say it, on dreams. Of course we make mistakes while we’re at it. But if J.B. Rhine was even partially right – and I’m convinced that he was – than acting on these “extra” senses might not always be a bad idea. We might be right more often than we might think. 

References

For a fascinating account of the Duke experiments see J.B. Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind, published by Farrar & Rinehart, in 1937. Upton Sinclair’s book Mental Radio was published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1930. The quotes of Paul come from 1 Corinthians 15: 12-13. Tenhaeff’s quote comes from page 38 of Telepathy and Clairvoyance, Views of Some Little Investigated Capabilities of Man, published in 1972 by Charles C. Thomas, Publisher.