From “The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy” by Matthew Boedy
As Bright and Cunningham met in Colorado in August 1975, Schaeffer and his wife were on a European film shoot for his tandem movie-and-book project How Should We Then Live? That book included analysis of the kind of topics on the list Cunningham and Bright had given each other. How Should We Then Live? Is a sweeping intellectual history of the impact of culture – from science to art to music to philosophy to capitalism to politics – on Christianity and its followers since its origin. In a previous book, Schaeffer had outlined the “line of despair” – that point at which a cohesive or unified answer to the accumulation of cultural knowledge is untenable and so the world drifts into secular, even nihilistic hopelessness. That certainly laid the ground for fears of a satanic rule of the world a la Cunningham and Bright.
The book and movie narrated by Schaeffer “became a sensation” in American evangelicalism, historical Daniel K. Williams wrote: “Conservative evangelicals had been looking for an explanation for the secular drift of their country, and Schaeffer’s diagnosis of contemporary cultural ills gave them a framework for understanding it.” The impact was clear: evangelicals now understood there was a “culture war” taking place in America, “and they were determined to become active participants in it.”