-Jay-

Folks -

I am curious about the background of Josh McDowell. I'm familiar with his account of his conversion to Christianity, and I've read quite a bit of his material in an attempt to understand the perspectives of some fundamentalist friends down through the years. However, I've encountered articles in the broader SecWeb and elsewhere that imply (or outright state) that McDowell didn't really write his books himself, but simply edited them, and I've seen statements to the effect that his conversion story is something he made up to appear to be a serious skeptic who came around to the fundamentalist worldview.

Given that you can't have a discussion with a conservative Christian without McDowell getting invoked at some point, I was hoping someone here might be willing to point me to a more detailed discussion of his background. I feel that I should know as much about him as I can find out since he's such a frequently cited source.

Thanks in advance.

regards,

NinJay

DCHindley

Hmmm, I don't know what his actual background is. My understanding is that he gets college students to research topics for him, then he edits and compiles the results into his books. I've read _Evidence_ and _More Evidence_, having already been aware of much that he dealt with in them, and was not impressed in any way by the depth of his understanding of the subjects with which he dealt.

I once sat through a lecture he gave at my college (a small liberal arts school operated by the United Bretheren church, which is kind of reformed/mennonite in orientation). While hearng him in person did not enhance his persuasive powers (although I was a Christian at the time), you should have seen the way the girls fawned over the man! He almost seemed like some sort of cult leader.

I also met a gal on a plane in March 2006 who worked at some fairly high level for gainusa.org (global aid network), which is affiliated with Josh McDowell and Campus Crusade for Christ. She also had a fairly high appreciation for McDowell, and she seemed like an intelligent enough person (hi Libby).

Try his website:

http://www.josh.org/

It looks like it pretty well explains how he does things there.

DCH

-Jay-

If you've got a citation for this, I'd be very interested in it.

Man, that's just creepy. I really believe that at the most basic level, it's all about getting the chicks.

When I was in college, farther back than I care to admit, CCC was one of those groups that if you were in it, you thought it was the greatest thing to come along since the wheel, and if you weren't, you pretty much didn't know it existed. I think the perception has changed a lot in the intervening decades. I know of folks now who seem extremely rational and well adjusted until you broach the subject of religion, and then they get all glassy eyed. It's the construction of those mental walls around certain subjects that's interesting to me.

Thanks for the pointer. I've been biased against looking at the man on his own terms, but to be completely objective, I really should do so.

regards,

NinJay

Roland

As a member of CCC in the late 70's, I also attended a JM conference (this one near the LA airport). I remember being very angry because in the middle of his lecture, he got sidetracked and spent the whole time teaching us all how to take notes!

I really felt that I'd been cheated because I didn't get what I had come for. Needless to say, I've never forgotten that.

DCHindley

That's part of his mystique - the careful student himself. In the lecture I attended (also late 70's) it seemed he was "preaching to the choir" so to speak. I doubt that any skeptics were attending, or that any of the others were seriously engaging one.

I do not remember whether he kept to the program or not. I had skimmed through _Evidence_ prior to that but did not think much of it at the time. I remember that the lecture just confirmed my initial impression that "there's nothing of real value here."

His web site says he was converted "39 years ago" which would put his conversion around 1968 or so. I saw him in 1977 or 1978, so he was active for about 10 years by then and had a solid reputation among campus Christian types.

DCH

DCHindley

Can't remember anymore. It may have been some book I came across at the library or bookstore that dealt with "cults." Back then there were lots of personality driven groups, and some folks, not always non-Christian, thought there was too much of it in mainstream Christianity. I don't tend to read extremist web pages, including rabid anti-Christian ones, but it could also have been some sort of web site that had more or less objective critiques of popular Christian movements.

The assertion that McDowell was simply editing materials researched for him by others could just be an explanation offered by the author of the critique. IT is similar to your initial statement, but I do not know if you came up with that yourself or read it somewhere. What the guy dos, as he himself admits, is apologetics. I mean, you can tell he really has no deep understanding of the subjects, but is just looking for things to ridicule and denigrate so his readers can feel better about ignoring things that make them uneasy.


I remember those days (1974-1978)! I was still nominally Christian back then, but critical of mainstream Christianity. I was beginning to become aware of and read the pseudepigrapha and "apostolic" fathers, and was quite surprised to learn that early Christianity was much more varied and early church history quite a bit more complex than we learned about in Sunday School.

DCH

-Jay-

I'm a very liberal Catholic. I actually teach a Sunday School class to 7th and 8th graders (12-14 year olds). One of the things I try to get across to them is that there's a lot of twists and turns in the history of the church that they won't find out about unless they look outside of the common literature. I also try to stress to them that just because someone older and more authoritative than they are states something as a fact, they need to check things for themselves. (I don't run a traditional "here's the scripture, here's what it means" class...)

Thanks again for your comments.

regards,

NinJay

wizardofmars

I agree with the OP that McDowell's name comes up a lot. As someone who endured a Mike Warnke concert because of well meaning Xtian friends at college, it would be ironic if McDowell turned out to be another pious fraud who had embellished his past like Warnke did.

The fact sheet at http://www.josh.org/pr/bio/pdf/bioProfile.pdf says he was born Aug 1939 and converted Dec 1959, two years out of high school at the ripe old age of 21 years! I don't see how he could have been much of a serious skeptic at that age. In fact, the whole skeptic angle looks somewhat pathetic when you realize how young he was, and I'll have to remember it next time a Xtian mentions McDowell. Thanks!

The Wikipedia article mentions a bio if you wanted to do more research.

* Josh: The Excitement of the Unexpected (or via: amazon.co.uk), by Joe Musser, Here's Life Publishers, San Bernadino, California, 1981. Also released under the title A Skeptic's Quest.

Amazon has copies for one cent. It must be a thrilling read.

Toto

David Hindley may be thinking of an essay by Ed Babinski on McDowell here in "The Uniqueness of the Christian Experience."

Ray Moscow

His "Evidence" books carry a lot of citations from college students.