Ryan Beiler: Even Stratfor Believes in a 'Solid Coalition' of Social Justice Evangelicals

For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, Stratfor is a highly unfluential consulting firm known in some circles as the "shadow CIA." At the very least, they're anything but apologists for progressive Christianity. But here's their most recent analysis, which I share, because frankly, it backs up my post from last week about the Joel Hunter resignation.

As the dispute at the leadership of the Christian Coalition shows, however, evangelicals are far less captive than many thought. A solid coalition within the evangelical movement appears to be moving toward a new political approach that adds poverty, environment and health care to the familiar Christian conservative issues of abortion, gay marriage and public decency.

And of course, we don't mind that they give us a shout out as well:

The leadership of the evangelical movement is beginning to split on these issues. In addition to Hunter, influential evangelicals such as conservative Wheaton College President Duane Litfin and the more liberal Jim Wallis are increasingly pressing for a new issue set.

You can read their entire analysis here. What I find most encouraging is that this is coming from an organization with no reason to be biased toward the success of broader evangelical political engagement - they're just reporting the situation with the hard-nosed approach they'd bring to any other issue.