As much as I like John Wayne, I must confess that I never have thought of him as a Christian evangelist.
But World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, in a recent account of his conversion to Christ, says one force that started him on the road away from atheism and Communism was “watching classic westerns with their strong sense of right and wrong.”
Who would of thunk it?
And Olasky is no clod who fell off the proverbial turnip truck.
An avowed atheist who had turned his back on his synagogue upbringing, he became a darling of the Communist Party in the 1970’s, using his capable pen to advance their causes.
“I worked at the Boston Globe,” he wrote, “with my Marxist perspective fitting right in.”
Graduate school professors also loved his leftist mouthings.
Back in the 1970’s when the Soviet Bear appeared to be invincible and the
But Olasky says his Communist convictions crumbled when God whispered in his brain, “What if Lenin is wrong? What if there is a God?”
For three years this brilliant man pursued the truth claims of Jesus. God led him through a mixed menu that eventually included the Christian existentialists, a Russian language New Testament, early Amer-ican Puritan sermons, and the writings of C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. Olasky’s search for truth finally brought him, “fighting and kicking much of the way,” to a Christian baptistry and church membership.
But this man with a Ph.D. is not too proud to tell us that God’s first light penetrated his unbelieving soul through the medium of shoot-’em-up-bang westerns. There he heard a simple truth denied by atheism and Communism, a truth his own soul validated, the basic truth of right and wrong.
Olasky’s testimony may validate the strategy chosen by Christian spokesman Josh McDowell in his worldwide effort to reach unbelievers. McDowell decided he could connect believers with unbelievers by addressing their mutual concerns about what is “Right and Wrong.”
So, my apologies, big John. This pilgrim just didn’t know you had it in you.