Marvin Olasky’s story puts politics in its place
Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment by Marvin Olasky. P&R Publishing, 2024. 200 pp., $17.99
Marvin Olasky, former editor of World and longtime advocate for “compassionate conservatism,” perhaps needs no introduction, but he has many stories to tell. His latest book, a sequel to his earlier memoir, Lament for a Father, breaks his story into five acts punctuated by “pivot points.” Time and distance bring perspective, Olasky believes. The most recent came to a close when he left World in November 2021 after that publication abandoned traditional journalistic objectivity for more partisan waters.
Act One, “Turbulence,” whisks readers along, covering Olasky’s time at Yale and his cross-country bicycle journey from New England to Bend, Oregon, the site of his first job. Already a self-proclaimed radical, Olasky then goes even further in showing his allegiance to Marxism by formally joining the Communist Party USA (“the worst decision of my life”) and making his way to San Francisco.
Catching a Soviet freighter bound for Siberia, he travels to Moscow, where he is supposed to interview Soviet officials, providing material for Party publications back in the U.S. But those meetings never happen, so the (somewhat) dejected Olasky makes his way through Eastern Europe and back to the U.S. All of this he recounts in four short pages, with his characteristically understated wit and verve, making the reader crave more detail, as surely this trip contains enough content for a standalone book.
As this act comes to a close, his self-described addiction to Communism suffers a lethal blow while, during Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan, he reads Lenin’s famous essay, “Socialism and Religion.” When he arrives at the assertion “Communists ‘must combat religion—this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism,’” Olasky has a thought that comes entirely out of the blue: “What if Lenin is wrong?”
He begins to question many of his own actions and beliefs, asking questions like, If my grandparents fled Russia for the U.S. during the 1917 Revolution (which they did), why do I hate America so much? For the next eight hours he sits in his chair, transfixed by thoughts questioning the foundations of his young adult life. “No drugs, no dreams, just sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly thinking Marxism is wrong. At three o’clock I’m an Atheist and a Communist. At eleven p.m. I’m a believer in a God of some kind. Hardly born again, but no longer dying.”
This near-road-to-Damascus experience eventually results in Olasky’s conversion and growth as a Christian. In Ann Arbor, he meets Susan and the two marry. He completes his Ph.D., and after some fits and starts spent working in the corporate world, he secures a grant from the Heritage Foundation to research and write The Tragedy of American Compassion. This book makes him the intellectual darling of Republican luminaries in the 90s. Indeed, Tom Brokaw, during one nightly news segment, calls Olasky “the Thomas Paine of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution.”
It should be said that Olasky never sought this fame and notoriety. Tragedy was a project whose purpose was to reveal the robust and oft-overlooked history of the church’s role in social welfare programs in the decades between Reconstruction and the New Deal. But this celebrated response to his book was partly a result of good timing, as Republicans were looking for a message that would unseat the Democratic party’s stranglehold on welfare narratives. While Olasky never sought to bolster the Republican party per se, it’s interesting that twenty-five years after being such a party icon, friction with current conservatives would find him out of step with a new version of conservatism. Such is the fickleness of politics.
The second half of the memoir deals primarily with his time teaching at the University of Texas at Austin while working as editor of the then growing World magazine, the place that would give him his largest consistent audience for the next several decades. World would also be where he would mentor hundreds of young journalists, always pushing them to get to the bottom of a story and never settling for sloppy work.
It is this level of editorial excellence that readers of World in the first decades of the twenty-first century would come to appreciate. He was not afraid to rankle even those within his own tribe, as he never shied away from airing evangelicalism’s dirty laundry when appropriate.
These editorial decisions often came with a price, but the magazine’s publisher, Joel Belz, was dogged in maintaining a “wall of separation” between donors or subscribers and the journalists under Olasky‘s care. And while the pressure to cave grew with the 2016 election, Olasky’s unwillingness to bend his journalistic principles put him at odds with a conservative board of directors equally unwilling to print stories that ran counter to a Trump-shaped party.
World would launch World Opinions in 2021, giving the magazine a formal space to add its voice to the dozens (hundreds?) of others in the echo chambers that litter the American political landscape in the 2020s. And while World and World Opinions were intended to be distinct publications, the potential for bleed over was too much for Olasky. It led to his resignation and the departure of other senior employees.
What then is Pivot Points? It is a memoir, but it’s also a work of catharsis by a man whose labor has redemptively shaped so many over the past generation. Olasky is grieving the loss of his voice at World. But anyone tempted to think that their life’s work was for naught will find in Olasky a companion able to point to a truer way of seeing the worth of their life.
John Plating directs Covenant College’s Center for Calling & Career. Prior to Covenant, John served a twenty-five year career in the U.S. Air Force, piloting various aircraft and teaching history at the Air Force Academy.