Hunted
God's pursuit of a radical activist
Introduction to a new series. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is now available.
When I was twenty, when I didn’t know God, I got caught up in the radical activist movement. It was the Vietnam war protest era, but the group I joined had a much broader agenda. The Progressive Labor Party (PL) claimed the mantle of Lenin and Marx. They styled themselves as a vanguard revolutionary party, a party of discipline and ideological rigor, poised to lead the working class in violent upheaval.
Heady stuff for an upper-middle class kid who feared the draft and dreaded getting swept up in a war 6,000 miles from home.
I did not have the excuse of not knowing much about communism. As a college freshman I’d been interested in Russian history and read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. I understood how the Bolshevik Party had capitalized on mass uprisings to seize power, then gone on to execute opponents and seize farms and factories. From Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which I’d read in high school, I was aware of the brutality of communist rule. I cannot claim to have been a dupe or a patsy to the New Left ideologues with whom I cast my lot in the late 1960’s. In their campaign to destroy the country that had nurtured me and prepared me for a position of privilege, I was not an unwitting accomplice.
Where I can claim ignorance was in my lack of understanding of capitalism and how free society works. 13 years of elite education, including grade school and college, had left me with only the haziest impressions of how an economy functions. All my life I’d been surrounded by comfort and wealth, and I had very little conception of how it was earned. I had a vague impression that people like us chose careers that rewarded their talents. Others with less education and talent worked to survive and lived lives of drudgery.
That was how I thought throughout childhood and most of adolescence. In my late teens, however, the picture turned darker. The civil rights movement simmered, urban riots erupted, and antiwar protest swept college campuses with all the fury of anti-Israel protest today. Having little understanding of how the world actually worked, I took all the accumulated grievances at face value, as if they were the entire truth about the world I was living in. The fairy-tale world I had built up in my head was replaced by an equally simplistic nightmare of repression and violence. This dystopian regime called America, I was convinced, would not change by itself; it had to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up. Extreme measures, but at 20, I could see no other alternative. In pursuit of this dark vision of justice, I renounced (I thought) my position of privilege and set out to destroy the society that sustained it.
Five dark years. I didn’t know God then, but of course He knew me and was aware of what I was doing. Knowing Him as I do now, I’m pretty sure that He wouldn’t just sit back and let all this happen. Even at the time, though I wasn’t a believer, I sensed something was happening behind the scenes that neither I nor my comrades understood. I had the impression someone was watching me. There were times when I was convinced someone intervened to protect me. More often it appeared that some unseen force reached out to thwart my efforts and those of my comrades.
Government spies? From time to time we discovered them in our midst, but this wasn’t they. This was more subtle. Besides, why would an agent of the U.S. government want to protect someone like me who announced openly his plans to destroy it?
Not all of these puzzling influences were external. My mental life mirrored the political disarray of the activist world. My vision of the glorious upheaval was clouded by vague misgivings, inexplicable regrets, and twinges of conscience. None of this belonged in the life of a committed radical activist. Try as I would, I couldn’t shake free of these reservations; it was a Herculean labor to push them to the back of my mind, not to mention hide them from comrades.
Where did these heretical thoughts come from? I had no idea at the time. 50 years later, I see what the source must have been. God is the author of moral law. Whether or not we acknowledge it to ourselves, we carry the law in our hearts. No one can escape conscience. During those rage-addled years, I felt His reproach at the borders of consciousness. Wherever I went, He was there, patiently hunting, never revealing Himself. Little by little, with infinite patience, He bent my steps toward His will, till at last I repented and found Him.
The episodes that follow will depict the unfolding of this pursuit. Each describes an event or encounter that puzzled or startled me, one more disturbing datum that challenged the world view of the radical activist.
I will now make a brazen logical leap and suggest that I am not the only radical activist hunted by God. If He is God, He isn’t just my father; He is the father of all of us. As you read these episodes, think about the rage-filled young people today who purport to hate Israel as much as I thought I hated America. Is God not at work in their lives, as He has been in mine?
They’re belligerent, naïve, annoying. But once upon a time, when I walked in their shoes, God saw me and felt compassion. He sent His foot-soldiers to wean me away from my life of aggression and rage. Who among us will He send today on the same errand?