New York Times best-selling author Tim LaHaye and author David Noebel give a wake-up call for Christians to fight the tide of popular beliefs and win the battle for your mind. Two basic sources of reasoning determine the thoughts, ideas, beliefs, values, aims, morals, lifestyles, and activities of mankind-the wisdom of man and the wisdom of God. According to Tim LaHaye and David Noebel, life is mainly about the battle for your mind: whether you will live by man's wisdom, from the likes of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, or God's wisdom and those who gave it, such as Moses, the prophets, Christ, and the apostles. Your choice will affect the way you live now and ultimately where you will spend eternity. Readers who are aligned with the Christian far right will find kindred spirits in authors Tim LaHaye (coauthor of the "Left Behind" series) and David Noebel ( Understanding the Times ). The duo has assembled a fear-producing manifesto attacking just about every known minority group and liberal social cause. In the opening chapter, (ominously titled "It Could Happen..."), the authors offer an exaggerated vision of what the world could look like in 10 years if we still forbid Christianity to be taught in U.S. public schools, or if Americans continue to offer gays and lesbians equal rights, or dozens of other similar horrors. What is the root of this evil future scenario? "Secular Humanism," according to the authors. "Unfortunately, the mainline churches ... have eaten, swallowed and disgusted tons of humanistic dogma: evolution, socialism, Marxism, higher criticism of the Bible, moral relativism, amoral sex education, nontraditional families, liberation theology, process theology, gay theology, feminist theology, black theology, world government, and global citizenship to name a few." Some readers will be thrilled by this call to trek what the authors feel is the moral high ground, especially those who base their religious values upon intolerance of racial equity, homosexual love, and women's right to choose (even if that choice makes her a single parent in a "nontraditional family"). Others will most likely find this a disturbing and offensive contribution to the American landscape. --Gail Hudson Thanks to sturdy coauthors such as Jerry Jenkins, his collaborator for the Left Behind series of apocalyptic romances, and Noebel, LaHaye, long a premier avatar of the Christian Right, has become probably the number one best-selling Evangelical Christian writer. This book re-sounds his 1980 call to arms Battle for the Mind , which helped popularize the term secular humanism and its definition as a faith hostile to Christianity and Judaism, and whose main tenets are atheism, evolution, amorality, human autonomy, and global socialism. LaHaye and Noebel eagerly argue, from mostly post-1980 sources that are, however, seldom primary, that it has only grown stronger since 1980. Indeed, things are so bad for Christians that, they posit in a fictional prologue, jackbooted humanists may be tossing believers in the loony bin by 2010. How to avoid that fate? Well, it is high time Christians got involved in politics, of course, by voting regularly, supporting promorality candidates, working on campaigns and political-party grunt work, and even running for office. Besides grassroots politicking, believers should labor to change the liberal-left culture of schools and colleges, the news media, Hollywood, and the rest of the usual culprits. If this seems unexciting, familiar advice, the trumpets of alarm that herald it are most excited. The troops will rally, though on both sides. Plus ca change . . . Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved