Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 21: A Professional Grief Observed
On November 1, 2021, the forty-eighth anniversary of the eight hours in my red chair that led me to believe in God, I send World’s board a letter resigning as editor in chief but saying I’ll stay on as dean of the World Journalism Institute. The magazine’s other senior editors and reporters also leave in November or during the next several months. Happily, they all find employment.
My last World column quotes the Breitbart News Network’s statement that “Democrats want to literally mask your children and then poison and defile them with racial hatred, gay-porn, anti-Americanism, and transsexual voodoo.” All Democrats, Breitbart says, “champion and encourage deadly race riots at the hands of their own personal Brownshirts.” I then challenge readers: Are you saying “Yeah!” to that screed? If so, how does that fighting talk go with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount statement “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God”?
In December 2021, I respond to a letter from a WJI student. She writes, “I’m in an ethics course right now and have to write on an ethical problem involving journalism. You had described during WJI how some of the things you publish make your readers or evangelical leaders angry, because you aren’t doing PR for Christian groups or political candidates. . . . Do you face an ethical dilemma when certain content might promise more readers and a more loyal reader base, but you choose not to run it? What are your standards?”
I write that it’s an ethical imperative to challenge readers and viewers, not pander to them. Some evangelicals believe the United States now has a “ruling class” that’s hijacked the country: we’re heading toward civil war. Oddly, some of the rhetoric is like what I used when on the political left half a century ago. But I believe that even in a polarized society like ours, God can still furnish the providential blessings and restraints that will allow us to muddle through—as long as we don’t treat opponents as enemies. We should follow Jeremiah 29:4–7 and try to bless rather than curse our cities and our neighbors.
In January 2022, World’s CEO tells me the World Journalism Institute will no longer employ me. An influential board member with a military background explains that West Point would not allow an instructor to express views contrary to Army policy. As in Spain during the five years before its civil war began in 1936, the armies of both the left and the right are arming themselves and expelling questioners. In 2023 MSNBC journalist Ariana
Pekary resigns from that network when she does not want to conform to a senior producer’s fawning standard: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”
After decades of building a World family, my mourning is real, and excommunication from WJI particularly hurts—but it also makes me realize I’ve made an idol out of World. I don’t want to exaggerate my sadness. It isn’t, thinking of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, like losing a wife. But I do want to show, as Joachim Neander wrote in his 1680 hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,” how oft in grief God has brought me relief, spreading his wings to o’ershade me.
For me, the grief process has four stages. The first includes the funeral announcement. The New York Times runs a long story by media reporter Ben Smith under the headline “His Reasons for Opposing Trump Were Biblical. Now a Top Christian Editor Is Out.” The story notes, “As the longtime editor of World, Olasky has delivered a mix of hard news and watchdog articles.”
Smith continues, “Olasky’s departure is just another example of the American news media sinking deeper into polarization, as one more conservative news outlet, which had almost miraculously retained its independence, is conquered by Mr. Trump. It also marks the end of a remarkable era at a publication that has shaken evangelical churches and related institutions with its deeply reported articles.”
The Times sees the political implications but does not delve into the issues of journalistic independence. I talk with the Religion News Service about that, then turn down other requests for interviews and podcast appearances. Now that the news is out, I don’t want to speak out of anger, and I don’t want to hurt World’s younger reporters who have lived with us.
During this first stage, I don’t publish anything about the World process because I still am angry. Yet God, the Hound of Heaven, pursues me. Every day my hound, Greeley, and I walk for two or three miles in the hilly neighborhoods around my home. Typically, if I’m not walking with someone, I listen to a podcast. Sometimes Susan and I listen to a podcast together as we walk. Providentially, the Gospel in Life podcast—Tim Keller sermons—has one series on forgiveness. Then another.
But, a poor listener, I come home from walks and do what Keller says we must not do. I read World Opinions commentaries and then stew over them. That keeps the hurt fresh in my mind. But Jeremiah Burroughs in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment reminds me to “make a good interpretation of God’s ways” and thank him for “the abundance of mercies” already bestowed.
J-Curve, a book by Paul Miller, is is also helpful in making that “good interpretation.” The shape of the letter J reminds us that Jesus died and then rose. Christian lives repeatedly show that we go down to come up. Without understanding the J, we might become bitter, thinking God has let us down. Understanding it, we learn that the Holy Spirit is often disruptive, which means that following God’s promptings often leaves us worse off materially
and organizationally—but then we rise.
God is kind even as I nurse my hurt. He provides another place for my book reviews and writings about homelessness and compassion. He allows me to finish a book cowritten with a brilliant young World reporter, Leah Savas, and then write another. He brings me ministry opportunities at church.
During the hard times, Susan and I discover that a little habit we took up is encouraging. Once we are both in bed, we sing one of three verses of a song mash-up I wrote several years ago. It combines “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and the Doxology. One day we add the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, which explains how God “so preserves me that apart from the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head.” It’s good news “that all things work together for my salvation.”
Spring 2022 brings a second stage, in which God uses these means and others to help me begin to forgive. I get sentimental at an August 2022 meeting of some of my fellow resigners upon hearing of their good placement at other publications. It makes me think our diaspora will accomplish something I do not foresee. At the end of the second stage, I write and Current publishes, on September 14, 2022, “A Wrinkle in Journalism History.” It calmly explains what happened at World. I could not have written it that way half a year earlier, and might not have a year later, but it’s a useful historical record that explains the principles involved.
In January 2023, I teach a short course on abortion history at Covenant College that goes for fourteen hours over three days, ending at noon on Saturday. Back in my room and tired, I spend the hours until midnight alternating an audiotape of Keller’s book Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? and a streaming on my computer of Godfather 1 and 2. The choice is clear: forgiveness, or bitterness plus vengeance.
Keller, following the Bible, says we need to forgive even if the person who wronged us doesn’t ask for forgiveness. He warns about the bitterness that can grow in us and warp us. He’s right, although it’s hard, since we always want to make exceptions in the particular case that grieves us.
I’m not saying the anger is all gone, but it’s not my controlling reality and I don’t dwell on it. After the Keller/Godfather experience, I move toward the end of the third stage and can look at the process with a bit of humor. “How We Saved World Millions of Dollars,” published by Current on April 19,
2023. As the article’s title suggests, it’s wry but not raw.
This memoir in its final, fall 2023 form represents completion of the fourth stage. God has during this process moved me through grief regarding some miserable months to gratitude for twenty-nine years with World. I no longer think that if I had just done Thing A or said Comment B, I could have changed the outcome. The transformation of World is not outside God’s will. As he proclaims in Isaiah 45:7 and 46:9–10, “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity. I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.”
