Evangelical women and minorities, it seems, exist on the muted margins of political discourse in America. If a justice revival is to sweep over America once more, from the suburban megachurch to the urban storefront church, then Christians must pursue a vision of the common good for all -- and not the common good of a few.
The public narratives of the media often chronicle the broadening social concerns of white evangelical males such as Rick Warren and Richard Cizik -- and rightfully so. Their story deserves to be told. But their story is not the only one.
As an African-American summer intern at Sojourners, I labored alongside two African-American women, two Asian women, and four white men and women -- all of whom persistently link spiritual renewal and social justice. To borrow an image from Gabriel Salguero, this technicolor portrait of evangelicals critiques the Alpine storyline, which is the subtle suggestion that only the broadening social concerns of progressive evangelical white males is newsworthy. Meanwhile, the stories of progressive evangelical minorities and women, the stories I heard at Sojourners, remain as invisible as the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's famous novel.
We stand at a critical moment in the socio-religious history of America. And before us lie two roads. One path pursues the common good of white evangelical men, while relying on the common labor of evangelical women and minorities. This path is marked by denominational positions that define minstry by gender and not gifting (shout-out to Dr. Mimi Haddad of Christians for Biblical Equality), theology that clarifies doctrine while obscuring the correlations of race and poverty, and well-intentioned civic disengagement that nevertheless stacks an already tilted deck of cards against the marginalized.
The other road, a glimpse of which I saw at Sojourners, relies upon the common labor of all evangelicals to pursue the common good of all. This pathway also has signposts: more women serving as bishops and pastors; theology that rhythmically alternates between digesting scripture and dismantling the poverty-race correlation; and wise engagement that represents the broad concerns of the evangelical constituency to the public and private sector. If we take creation care as a representative example, following this path would mean, amongst other things, advocating for green jobs as a response to structural inner-city unemployment.
For understandable and yet lamentable reasons, some evangelicals head down the first pathway; precious few are moving down the second. Of course this ''two roads'' dichotomy simplifies the complex phenomenon of American evangelicalism. Hopefully, however, it also underscores the urgency of now. Christians must toil for, and not just wish for, a technicolor justice revival that pursues the common good of all.
Andrew Wilkes is a policy and organizing intern at Sojourners. He is currently pursuing a Masters of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. He offers reflections at Foursquare, a blog that encourages abstinence as a spiritual discipline with social consequences.
The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA.org) was launched in 1979, in response to growing concern "over an increase of [sic] questionable fund-raising practices in the nonprofit sector." As their Web site explains, Sen. Mark Hatfield challenged "a group of key Christian leaders" to begin policing their own mission agencies as a kind of "Christian Better Business Bureau."
Perhaps 30 years later, evangelicals, because of "an increase in questionable rhetorical practices in the nonprofit sector," need to form the ECRA: The Evangelical Council for Rhetorical Accountability. Those of us who have a lot of pew time know ... not to mention those who listen to religious broadcasting and partake of religious literature, Web sites, and blogs (!) ... that such accountability is sorely lacking.
The need for an ECRA became clearer than ever to me this week when a beloved elder in the evangelical broadcasting community spoke out against Sen. Barack Obama. What is evident to me in this interchange is not just a difference in policy, but also a ...
Whenever I hear those three little words -- "the latest poll" -- I generally tune out. Pollsters and survey-takers seldom ask the right questions, I've found, so the responses they get are less than reliable. One exception is the surveys conducted by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and the organization's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, released Monday, June 23, proves why.
The Pew survey not only asks highly specific and carefully worded questions but also asks participants to provide detailed information about themselves. Demographic breakdowns go well beyond, say, the evangelical/mainline divide to subgroups such as Baptists in the evangelical tradition, the mainline tradition, or the historically black church traditions; mainline Christians who pray daily and regularly attend church services; and Catholics who consider religion to be very important in their lives.
So we know who Pew talked to, and that makes the results of this survey particularly compelling -- and encouraging to those of us who stubbornly hold on to the hope that we can effect political and social change by building on the common ground that unites us as Christians. And the meticulous wording of the survey enabled Pew analysts to recognize such nuances as the indirect influence of religion on political life.
Here's what I see in the survey as cause for hope:
Seventy to 87 percent of all Christians expressed dissatisfaction with the political system and the direction the country is taking. Imagine what we could accomplish if we turned that level of dissatisfaction into action.
Even though 48 percent of evangelicals prefer a smaller government that provides fewer services, 57 percent believe the government should do more to help the poor, even if it means going into debt. That may seem incongruous, but I don't think it is. To me, it indicates that evangelicals place a higher value on helping the poor than on some other governmental services.
Fifty-four percent of evangelicals believe stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost. That's compared to 64 percent of mainline respondents, which dispels the long-held myth that mainliners and evangelicals are clearly divided on this issue.
While only 48 percent of evangelicals favor diplomacy over military strength as a means of ensuring peace, I have to believe that's an improvement. (38 percent favor military might over diplomacy, with 16 percent responding "neither," "both," or "don't know.")
The gap between evangelicals and mainline Christians is also much narrower than was once the case with regard to foreign affairs. Fifty-four percent of evangelicals and 52 percent of mainliners believe we should pay more attention to domestic problems than to international problems.
That last question is one of the few I think could have been better worded. The alternative response was, "It's best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs." Given that wording, I would have also opted for paying more attention to problems at home. But the question makes no distinction, for example, between involvement in Iraq and involvement in Darfur. If it had, the responses likely would have been different.
In any event, the survey results indicate, among many other things, that Christians of all stripes are far more united on some social and political issues than our politicians and religious leaders would have the American public believe. And that's good news -- no, great news -- for everyone who favors working together to solve problems over battling it out along partisan or denominational lines.
James Dobson, of Focus on the Family Action, and his senior vice president of government and public policy, Tom Minnery, used their "Focus on the Family" radio show to criticize Barack Obama's understanding of Christian faith. In the show, they describe Obama as "deliberately distorting the Bible," "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter," "willfully trying to confuse people," and having a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution."
The clear purpose of the show was to attack Barack Obama. On the show, Dobson says of himself, "I'm not a reverend. I'm not a minister. I'm not a theologian. I'm not an evangelist. I'm a psychologist. I have a Ph.D. in child development." Child psychologists don't insert themselves into partisan politics in the regular way that James Dobson does and has over many years as one of the premier leaders of the Religious Right. He has spoken about how often he talked to Republican leaders -- Karl Rove, administration strategists, and even President Bush himself. This year he tried to influence the outcome of the Republican primary by saying he would never vote for John McCain or the Republicans if they nominated him, then reversed himself and said he would vote after all but didn't say for whom. But why should America care about how a child psychologist votes?
James Dobson is insinuating himself into this presidential campaign, and his attacks against his fellow Christian, Barack Obama, should be seriously scrutinized. And because the basis for his attack on Obama is the speech the Illinois senator gave at our Sojourners/Call to Renewal event in 2006 (for the record, we also had Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback speak that year), I have decided to respond to Dobson's attacks. In most every case they are themselves clear distortions of what Obama said in that speech. I was there for the speech; Dobson was not.
I haven't endorsed a candidate, but I do defend them when they are attacked in disingenuous ways, and this is one of those cases. You can read Obama's two-year-old speech, [audio link] which was widely publicized at the time, and you can see that Dobson either didn't understand it or is deliberately distorting it. There are two major problems with Dobson's attack on Obama.
First, Dobson and Minnery's language is simply inappropriate for religious leaders to use in an already divisive political campaign. We can agree or disagree on both biblical and political viewpoints, but our language should be respectful and civil, not attacking motives and beliefs.
Second, and perhaps most important, is the role of religion in politics. Dobson alleges that Obama is saying:
I [Dobson] can't seek to pass legislation, for example, that bans partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don't see that as a moral issue. And if I can't get everyone to agree with me, it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. ... What he's trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.
Contrary to Dobson's charge, Obama strongly defended the right and necessity of people of faith in bringing their moral agenda to the public square, and he was specifically critical of many on the left and in his own Democratic Party for being uncomfortable with religion in politics.
Obama said that religion is and always has been a fundamental and absolutely essential source of morality for the nation, but he also said that "religion has no monopoly on morality," which is a point I often make. The United States is not the Christian theocracy that people like James Dobson seem to think it should be. Political appeals, even if rooted in religious convictions, must be argued on moral grounds rather than as sectarian religious demands -- so that the people (citizens), whether religious or not, may have the capacity to hear and respond. Religious convictions must be translated into moral arguments, which must win the political debate if they are to be implemented. Religious people don't get to win just because they are religious. They, like any other citizens, have to convince their fellow citizens that what they propose is best for the common good -- for all of us, not just for the religious.
Instead of saying that Christians must accept the "the lowest common denominator of morality," as Dobson accused Obama of suggesting, or that people of faith shouldn't advocate for the things their convictions suggest, Obama was saying the exact opposite -- that Christians should offer their best moral compass to the nation but then engage in the kind of democratic dialogue that religious pluralism demands. Martin Luther King Jr. perhaps did this best, with his Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other.
One more note. I personally disagree with how both the Democrats and Republicans have treated the moral issue of abortion and am hopeful that the movement toward a serious commitment for dramatic abortion reduction will re-shape both parties' language and positions. But that is the only "bloody notion" that Dobson mentions. What about the horrible bloody war in Iraq that Dobson apparently supports, or the 30,000 children who die each day globally of poverty and disease that Dobson never mentions, or the genocides in Darfur and other places? In making abortion the single life issue in politics and elections, leaders from the Religious Right like Dobson have violated the "consistent ethic of life" that we find, for example, in Catholic social teaching.
<p>Dobson has also fought unsuccessfully to keep the issue of the environment and climate change, which many also now regard as a "life issue," off the evangelical agenda. Older Religious Right leaders are now being passed by a new generation of young evangelicals who believe that poverty, "creation care" of the environment, human trafficking, human rights, pandemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and the fundamental issues of war and peace are also "religious" and "moral" issues and now a part of a much wider and deeper agenda. That new evangelical agenda is a deep threat to Dobson and the power wielded by the Religious Right for so long. It puts many evangelical votes in play this election year, especially among a new generation who are no longer captive to the Religious Right. Perhaps that is the real reason for Dobson's attack on Barack Obama.
It is no secret that young evangelicals are opting out of the 'religious right' in ever-larger numbers, and are becoming more (what for lack of a better term we'll call) progressive. With the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, many young evangelicals are asking tough questions and beginning to make connections.
Our politics are coming out differently, but it is not that we reject everything our parents believe. Rather, we take seriously something beneath the rhetoric. We are pro-life, but realize this doesn't end with the womb. The U.S. War on Terror, the death penalty, genocide in Darfur, the AIDS crisis, and global warming also violate the sanctity of human life. We are pro-family, but realize that gays and lesbians are being used as a scapegoat by the Right. The commodification of sex, housing and healthcare costs, mass imprisonment, and raids on immigrant communities are all forces tearing families apart.
Many of these crises are perceived as 'liberal' issues. Polls show that young evangelicals are voting increasingly for Democrats is all but a given. The temptation I pray we will avoid is hopping in bed with the Democrats like previous generations did with the Republicans. It is my hope, that instead of becoming more liberal, we would become more biblical. We need to be more realistic about partisan politics, both its capacity to exploit and use the church and its limits in creating large-scale social change.
In Matthew's Gospel, when the mother of James and John asked for positions of power for her sons in what she thought would be Jesus' revolutionary government, he replied: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant..." Essentially, Jesus was saying the practice of government is domineering and self-serving; disciples are to understand and exercise power in a different way.
We should not place our hopes solely on our representatives, senators, or presidents to enact our values for us. Rather, we should learn how personal the political truly is, by living out the changes we want to see take place in the wider world. Then, the political choices we make will flow naturally out of the work we're already doing as part of being the church. What I mean is, part of the faith community's vocation is feeding the hungry, providing shelter for those who have none, caring for single mothers, working for peace, and so forth. Casting a ballot should simply be an extension of that prior service--not an excuse for noninvolvement with the marginalized--but a chance to further the work we should already be doing.
Widespread social change will not come merely from the election of a "change candidate," but from the movements of nonconforming minorities, faith communities, and others, whose lives take the shape of servanthood and whose voices are joined with those on the opposite side of the power equation. This is our real work, to which we must be committed for more than one day in November.
What's at issue in the SBC, and in the larger evangelical community (and, we could add, in the mainline and Roman Catholic communities as well), isn't whether faith is political. Nobody (or almost nobody) is arguing for dropping the second half of the great commandment -- so that "loving God" is about faith and is central, but "loving neighbor" is about politics and is therefore marginal. Nobody is trying to divide the world into a spiritual realm that is personal and private and about faith, versus a secular realm that is social and public and about politics. Nobody is trying to say that faith has nothing to say about how people organize and govern themselves - how they seek justice, how they express kindness, how they walk humbly with God and in harmony with themselves, their neighbors, their enemies, and God's creation as a whole.
On both sides of these tensions -- this is worth emphasizing once more, to the point of redundancy -- we're agreed that faith relates to all of life, that faith is, as Jim Wallis wisely and repeatedly reminds us, both personal and social, both private and public. Nobody (or almost nobody) disagrees on this anymore -- thanks be to God.
The problem comes when "politics" comes to mean "dirty politics" or "partisan politics" or "narrow, wedge-issue, litmus-test, culture-wars politics." So when people suggest that caring for the environment is not a political issue, what they really mean (I think) is that it shouldn't be a partisan issue, a wedge issue, a left-right issue. Rather, they're saying that as followers of Christ, we shouldn't begin with the question, "What would Karl Rove (or James Carville) do?" We should ask the more obvious and Christian question. We should start with faith in our Creator and then move to politics in a spirit of justice, kindness, and humility -- not start with partisan politics and use faith to buttress it on the one hand, and not reduce faith to the private, personal realm so it has nothing to do with politics on the other.
So, perhaps when we read articles and hear discussions on faith and politics, we should develop the habit of raising this question, "Before we go any further, what do you mean by politics?"
A recent New York Times story, "Taking Their Faith, but Not Their Politics, to the People," highlights the challenge faced by followers of Christ who seek to integrate their faith with all aspects of life, including political life in a democracy. The article suggests to me a question that we should raise more frequently when people address "faith and politics," or "faith versus politics," namely: "What do you mean by politics?"
The article begins and ends by recounting a mini-culture war going on in Missouri. It may be no surprise that the conflict involves Southern Baptists, who are known for their willingness to plunge headlong into battle for what they believe is right (in both senses of the word). What's surprising, though, is that the battle isn't between Baptists and secular-humanist-postmodernist-liberal-heathens outside, but rather with fellow Baptists.
It turns out that some members of a SBC-affiliated new congregation called the Journey gather on occasion to discuss theology and life with their unchurched friends in (gasp) a pub. Some fellow Baptists see this as the first step on a slippery slope that may lead to alcoholism, drug addiction, fornication, and (I'm partially joking here) maybe even Democratic and Obama-voting tendencies, so they have agreed not to fund new churches like the Journey in the future.
The article mentions another fissure in the SBC structure. This one pits a 25-year-old graduate of Liberty University - and son of a former SBC president - against Richard Land, SBC giant in public affairs. This David-Goliath conflict concerns not beer but the environment, and whether Southern Baptists have been too timid in addressing environmental issues. Jonathan Merritt, starring as David, took a stand on behalf of the planet and has drawn about 250 others (and counting) to stand with him. Land, seemingly convinced that environmental regulations are presently a greater threat to humanity than environmental degradation, has criticized Merritt and friends, and has in fact persuaded some of the original signors to un-sign.
Dean Inserra, 27-year-old pastor of the Well in Tallahassee, Florida - another SBC church more in the tradition of David than Goliath - offers his assessment of the tension: "There is so much resistance to the environmental initiative because it is a threat to the right-wing agenda that has crept into the Southern Baptist Convention." Then he raises this question: "How is taking care of God's creation a political issue? Since I am pro-life, I am pro-environment."
Inserra's comment, along with others in the Times article, shows how the word "political" is used in different ways. The article's description of "a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right" similarly shows the ambiguity of the word "politics." Consider the previous statement in light of what follows:
They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.
In this light, "politics" means culture wars, litmus tests, anti-gay rights, narrow agendas. Is that a good definition? If we define politics more intentionally - as how groups of people organize and govern themselves - then the NYT article is mistitled and its repeated pitting of faith versus politics obscures the issue.
I've remarked to a number of friends lately that there seem to be three main kinds of religious people in the world.
First, there are the fearsome -- those who like to make others afraid.
Second, there are the fearless -- those who refuse to be intimidated by the fearsome.
Then in the middle are the fearful -- those who are afraid to associate with the fearless because they might incur the ire of the fearsome.
I've noticed over the years that a favorite tactic of the fearsome is "guilt by association." A small group of the fearsome is using this tactic this week to attack Kay Warren for her participation in the upcoming Envision 08 gathering at Princeton University, June 9-11.
Kay Warren Joins Heavy-Weight Emergents at Envision 08
Kay Warren, wife of Purpose Driven pastor Rick Warren, will join several heavy-weight emergent leaders at the upcoming Envision 08 event this June. Kay Warren will share a platform with Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis (Sojourners magazine), Shane Claiborne, Jay Bakker (son of PTL Jim Bakker), Doug Pagitt, and several other speakers who share emerging church proclivities.
In my opinion, Kay Warren is a hero. I doubt she would even be aware of "emergent heavyweights," much less wish to be associated with them. She is busy helping influence thousands of Christians to care in unprecedented ways for people in need around the world -- especially for those suffering from HIV/AIDS. The fearsome critics choose to ignore the amazing good Kay and Rick Warren have done and are doing, and instead they attack Kay for attending an event that includes people like (shudder) Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis, Jay Bakker, Doug Pagitt, and (shudder again) me.
Ironically, today's fearsome were probably yesterday's fearful who became co-opted by a mindset of fear. One can hope that more and more of today's fearful will refuse to be intimidated or play into the old politics of fear. After all, recalling Paul's words (2 Timothy 1:7), God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline.
When people tell me about the latest statements of these well-intentioned but less-than-fully-informed people, I feel like Nehemiah: I have important work to do and I don't want to get involved in their debates (6:3-13). Nor do I want to waste my and others' time in the kind of arguments Paul warned Timothy about (2 Timothy 2:14). So, may God bless the fearsome with a good night's sleep and a better attitude tomorrow, and may God bless Kay and Rick Warren for their good work -- fighting HIV/AIDS and helping the poor around the world (Galatians 2:10). And may God bless all who will make Envision 08 a remarkable, positive, Christ-honoring event. May few be intimidated or discouraged by the attacks of the fearsome, but instead, may many be strengthened in their resolve to do what's right and good -- fearlessly. And may we all manifest the fruit of the Spirit through all these controversies ... love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Last week, I wrote about the new Evangelical Manifesto, of which I was a signatory. It's been interesting to see the news coverage that followed its release.
On the one hand,CNN implied that the statement was pro-Democratic:
For Democrats, the timing is good. The party has been pushing to overcome the "faith gap," that many feel has hurt them with church-going voters. ... Evangelicals are now leading public support for many issues dear to Democrats: global campaigns against AIDS, hunger and poverty.
The Manifesto itself, while arguing that "evangelical" must be defined first and foremost as a theological term, not a political one, went on to say:
Called by Jesus to be "in" the world but "not of" the world, we are fully engaged in public affairs, but never completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, class, tribe, or national identity. ...
Called to an allegiance higher than party, ideology, and nationality, we Evangelicals see it as our duty to engage with politics, but our equal duty never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality. In our scales, spiritual, moral, and social power are as important as political power,
It's a point I have made many times: "God is not a Republican or a Democrat," and that is a good thing. There should be no religious litmus tests for politics - committed Christians will, and should be, on both sides of the political aisle. Indeed, people of faith should never be in any party's or candidate's political pocket and should, ideally, be the ultimate swing vote because of their moral independence from partisan politics.
But the media just can't help themselves and always want to squeeze everything into their old framework of left and right, Democrat and Republican. But "left" and "right" are not religious categories, and people of faith should define their political involvement in moral terms, not partisan predictability, and that's exactly what the Manifesto said. Even the media coverage of the Manifesto shows how much the statement is needed.
Let me make a prediction. In the future, we will see new alliances and campaigns led by people of faith on a wide range of moral issues - such as poverty, the environment, pandemic diseases, torture, and human rights, and a much wider and deeper focus on the dignity and sanctity of life, including war and peace and even the death penalty along with unborn children - that will involve people of faith across the political spectrum and will shake up politics. The social movements that really change politics are precisely that - public engagement defined by religious and moral commitment that defies normal political categories. Eventually, even the media will finally get it. Stay tuned.
The church has a serious image problem. A recent book, unChristian, by Barna pollster David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons reveals much about how Millennials, the emerging generation - both those inside and around the church - view Christianity. The results weren't good. An overwhelming majority of young people view Christians as hypocritical, too judgmental, too focused on the afterlife, and too political in the worst sense of the word. And that image is often particularly true of evangelicals. That's a lot of baggage we're carrying around.
But other studies show that when you ask people what they think about Jesus, you get answers like: compassionate, loving, caring, hung out with sinners and poor people, for peace. We have a serious image problem. People think that we should stand for the same things as Jesus did. So it's time to change the image.
A substantial group of evangelical leaders are trying to do just that. This morning, a new statement, An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment, was released in Washington, D.C. The statement has two purposes - to address the confusion about who evangelicals are and to clarify a view on evangelicals in public life.
On the first point, the manifesto says:
Our first task is to reaffirm who we are. Evangelicals are Christians who define themselves, their faith, and their lives according to the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth. (Evangelical comes from the Greek word for good news, or gospel.) Believing that the Gospel of Jesus is God's good news for the whole world, we affirm with the Apostle Paul that we are "not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation." Contrary to widespread misunderstanding today, we Evangelicals should be defined theologically, and not politically, socially, or culturally.
It then goes on to identify seven "beliefs that we consider to be at the heart of the message of Jesus and therefore foundational for us." They are primarily theological affirmations, including:
We believe that being disciples of Jesus means serving him as Lord in every sphere of our lives, secular as well as spiritual, public as well as private, in deeds as well as words, and in every moment of our days on earth, always reaching out as he did to those who are lost as well as to the poor, the sick, the hungry, the oppressed, the socially despised, and being faithful stewards of creation and our fellow creatures.
On the question of public life, the manifesto recognizes that the political categories of left and right simply don't fit religion, and it is a big mistake to try to fit religion into them. The people I meet across the country are yearning for a moral center to our public life and political discourse, with a fundamental emphasis on the common good. They want to understand better the moral choices and challenges that lie beneath our political debates. More and more people want to see a common-good politics replace the politics of individual gain and special interests.
The manifesto affirms that:
We must find a new understanding of our place in public life. We affirm that to be Evangelical and to carry the name of Christ is to seek to be faithful to the freedom, justice, peace, and well-being that are at the heart of the kingdom of God, to bring these gifts into public life as a service to all, and to work with all who share these ideals and care for the common good. Citizens of the City of God, we are resident aliens in the EarthlyCity. Called by Jesus to be "in" the world but "not of" the world, we are fully engaged in public affairs, but never completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, class, tribe, or national identity.
I very much affirm the views expressed in the manifesto and was happy to accept an invitation to be one of the charter signatories. Click here to read the statement, a helpful study guide, and to see who the charter signatories are.
My dear friend, Ken Wilson, who pastors the Ann Arbor Vineyard, showed me a chart that I found very helpful:
Evangelical
Charismatic
Social Justice
Liturgical
What has happened in the last generation is that there has been border-blending among the four great movements in the church. So we find many evangelicals who feel very comfortable praying for the sick and casting out demons; and there are many evangelicals who engage in liturgical practices such as using the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in their devotional lives, etc.
But while there has been a huge move of border-blending, there are still many corner-dwellers, people who believe that it is entirely wrong for someone in their camp to engage in practices associated with one of the other three camps. Corner-dwellers get really mean and mad when we step out of our traditional boxes.
So, for example, some conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists get mean and mad when we claim to be evangelical, but we engage in border-blending with one of the other wings of the church. Like the Pharisees of Jesus'’ day, some angry corner-dwellers may set themselves up as the judge of what is biblical - like the Pharisees, they get really mad when we associate with “the wrong sort of people,” and, like the Pharisees, they are constantly looking for reasons to accuse border-blenders for our supposed theological errors.
I look forward to a day when an evangelical church that does a Justice Revival not only doesn’t create any controversy, but hardly raises an eyebrow. I look forward to a day when Christians who hear about a Justice Revival say: “So, what else is new? Of course, evangelical churches are involved in social justice. That is what Christian churches are supposed to do. We are supposed to follow Jesus, who is both the God of justification and the God of justice!”
Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.
In church one day, my pastor asked us to raise our hands if we believed in what the Bible said. The right answer seemed pretty obvious, and the whole congregation and I raised our hands. Then he asked us to raise our hand if we had read the Bible in its entirety. Touché, Pastor Sean. Touché.
In his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A.J. Jacobs lives as a biblical fundamentalist so you don't have to. Jacobs describes himself as "Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant" and seeks advice from rabbis, pastors, church members, historians, and textbooks on his quest to live the "ultimate Biblical life." The book chronicles his attempt to conform to the myriad rules found in the Bible (Don't wear mixed fibers! Be fruitful and multiply! Stone adulterers! Forgive!), and the results are often pretty funny. Yes, Jacobs sets out to lampoon Biblical fundamentalists, but by the end of his experiment he finds himself changed - he reveres life more, he is a better father, and he has more respect for people of faith. I picked up this book for laughs, but was surprised when I ended up quite touched by it. A.J. Jacobs writes with the tone of a friend, and when I finished the book I felt I had found a fellow believer (he now calls himself a "reverent agnostic") walking by my side.
By day 264, you warm up to Christian literalists as embodied by Dr. Tony Campolo and the Red Letter Christians. How did your year-long experiment affect your perception of Christian "fundamentalists", especially in contrast to how they are portrayed in mainstream media?
It changed it drastically. Like many Americans, I used to have an embarrassingly simplistic view of evangelical Christianity. I thought it was this monolithic movement where everyone walked in lock step with Pat Robertson. I figured almost all evangelical Christians were focused on the issues of homosexuality and abortion. I hadn't heard of the Red Letter Christians and their focus on poverty and the environment. I missed the complexity of evangelical Christianity, as does much of the media. It's sort of the equivalent of saying, 'Oh, James Taylor and Kid Rock are both rock musicians, so they're pretty much the same.'
You call your book a "(gentle) attack" on fundamentalism, as you set out to show how absurd and impossible it is to live a literally Biblical lifestyle without dropping out of general society. Is there anything that especially surprised or delighted you about following the rules? How about anything that really scared you?
So much surprised and delighted me. I fell in love with the Sabbath. I enjoyed the ban on gossiping (not that I was totally successful; I live in New York and I work in the media, so gossip is about as omnipresent as air). And here's an odd one: I liked following the second commandment literally: No making images. I took this to the limit. No turning on the TV, no watching DVDs, no photos, no doodles. And it turned out to be really helpful. I think our culture is too much in love with images. Everything is image-driven, and we're forgetting how to read. And there's something sacred about reading.
What scared me? I guess how easy it is to become self-righteous. I had to fight it every day.
On day 14, you crib a line from "Chariots of Fire" about feeling God's pleasure as you tithe to charities. Have you managed to maintain any of the Biblical practices from your experiment so that you can continue feeling "the warm ember that starts at the back of [your] neck?"
I do still try to do good works. I don't do as much as I should. And I don't tithe as strictly as I should - I'm down from 10 percent to maybe seven or eight percent. But I try. Because my Bible year taught me something that I wish I had known for the first 38 years of my life.
If you want to be happy, you should pursue OTHER people's happiness. You should do good things for others. It's a paradox, but it works. Being unselfish leads to selfish fulfillment.
Who would OT God vote for? Who would NT Jesus endorse?
Wasn't it a wise man named Jim Wallis who said that God was not a Republican or Democrat?
I do remember that part of the Old Testament where God is choosing whom to anoint as the next king of Israel. And a man named Jesse parades all his sons before the prophet Samuel. And Samuel sees the tallest son, Eliab and figured he will be the new leader.
"But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."
Which is good news for Dennis Kucinich. Too bad he dropped out.
But it does remind us: Look beyond the superficial.
You've given a lot of interviews for this book, most of which are on the web somewhere. Tell me something about you that I can't google.
I'll tell you all the answers to my four-year-old son's favorite questions. My favorite color is green. My favorite animal is a zebra. My favorite candy is caramel. And my favorite Dora character is probably Boots the Monkey. You won't find that on the Internet!
Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners. For more information on the book, click here.
Let me give you an illustration of the difference between the narrow focus of contemporary American evangelicalism and the big focus of the Bible.
D.L. Moody, the great 19th-century evangelist, described his calling and said that he essentially understood the world as being like an ocean liner that hit an iceberg. God had said to him, "Moody, it is your job to pull as many drowning people out of the water into lifeboats as you can."
Now, that may have been Moody's calling. I don't fault him at all for his understanding of his particular calling. But his "lifeboat theology," which claims that really the only thing that matters is evangelism -- pulling as many folks into lifeboats as you can -- has been both a blessing and a great curse for contemporary evangelicalism. On the one hand, it has created an evangelistic urgency. And it is evangelical churches that are growing because of this passion. On the other hand, by narrowing the focus simply upon getting people to say the Sinner's Prayer, we have had almost nothing to say about whole slices of life.
Let me suggest an alterative theology: "Ark Theology." Noah's Ark not only saved people, it preserved God's other creatures as well. The covenant that God made with Noah and his descendents was not only with humanity, but we read in Genesis 9:10 these words:
and with every living creature that was with you -- the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you -- every living creature on earth.
The rainbow was not just a sign between God and people, but we read in Genesis 9:12, 15 and 17 these words:
And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come. (v. 12)
I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. (v. 15)
So God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth." (v. 17)
The Ark Theology -- that God intends to restore all of creation, every realm, every creature, every part. Or as Abraham Kuypur, the great Dutch theologian and politician said nearly 100 years ago, "There is not a square inch of the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ who is sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'"
Lifeboat Theology: Jesus wants to be Lord of your life.
Ark Theology: Jesus is Lord over the universe.
Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.
Social justice is not a distraction from our commitment; it is part and parcel of the gospel of the kingdom. We read in Mark 1:15:
"The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!"
What is the message of the kingdom? Certainly the center of the message is the proclamation that through one's faith in Jesus Christ (the King), a person can be eternally saved. Thus my church regularly calls people to put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to be born again and enter God's kingdom.
But that is not the circumference or totality of the message of the kingdom. The ultimate goal of the kingdom goes beyond the salvation of us as individuals (wonderful as that is) and involves the restoration and renovation of the entire universe. The message of the kingdom is a fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah's vision in Isaiah 65:17, 20-25:
"See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. ...
"Never again will there be infants who live but a few days, or older people who do not live out their years; those who die at a hundred will be thought mere youths; those who fail to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent's food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain," says the Lord.
This message was echoed by all the prophets. So the prophet Micah says this in 4:1-4:
In the last days the mountain of the Lord's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between many peoples and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken.
The apostle Paul speaks about the cosmic sweep of this message of the kingdom. He tells us that not only we, but the entire creation, will be freed from the curse of the fall (Romans 8:19-21). In Ephesians, the apostle Paul again enlarges the scope of the message beyond our individual salvation when he says in Ephesians 1:9-10:
[H]e made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment; to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
This enormous plan, involving the renovation and restoration of the entire universe, is what we pray for when we pray the Lord's Prayer, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
So when we Christians feed the hungry in the name of Jesus, or heal a sick person in the power of Christ, or work for peace in this war-torn world, or help reconcile a marriage, or extend help to immigrants, or work for the responsible care of the environment, these actions are not a distraction from our commission to preach the gospel of the kingdom. Rather, we are living out our calling as kingdom people to partner with God in bringing about the healing of the entire universe.
Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. Click here for more details.
During the closing days of January, more than 15,000 Baptists from 30 different Baptist denominations gathered together at the Convention Center in Atlanta. Although all Baptist groups were invited to join in what was called The New Baptist Covenant, official representatives from the largest Baptist group in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention, were conspicuously absent. Although they were invited, the SBC officials chose not to attend. There were good reasons for that.
First, the plenary speakers at this gathering were not speakers who would have been welcomed at the annual meetings of the SBC. They included Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and John Grisham - all of whom would likely be treated as persona non grata by Southern Baptist leaders.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the unspoken agenda of the New Baptist Covenant was to provide a Baptist alternative to the politics and practices of the Southern Baptist Convention. Those Baptists who did attend, representing denominations with a combined membership of more than 20 million other Baptists, were viewed by the leaders of the SBC as a kind of "in your face" demonstration that they were tired of being painted by the general public with the same broad brush that has wrongly allied them with many positions taken by the SBC.
Most of those in this New Baptist Covenant, unlike their SBC brothers and sisters, have no problem with women in the pastoral ministry, and are not necessarily fans of the Bush administration. Strong anti-war sentiment was easily discernable among those in attendance. Representing what they considered a moderate stance on such issues - in contrast with the overtly Religious Right commitment of the SBC - they went on to reaffirm historic Baptist principles. These included a belief that the local church should decide on what should be its practices (in contrast to the SBC practice that Baptist state conventions can lay down beliefs and practices that determine whether or not a given church is acceptable for membership in their respective fellowships); and the principle of "sole conscience," which abhors doctrinal conformity (in contrast to the SBC requiring the signing on to creedal statements by any who would be its missionaries or serve in its denominational seminaries or offices).
In seeking unity among the many Baptist participants, those who planned this get-together selected Concern for the Poor as their theme for the conference. Recognizing that there are more than 2000 verses in Scripture that call upon the people of God to care for the poor, the organizers of the New Baptist Covenant decided that there would be no argument among those attending this gathering, given this focus of attention.
It seemed to work! There was a sense of joyful oneness pervading each and every session. In this respect, the New Baptist Covenant was in harmony with the defining mission of Sojourners. This movement lent support to the work of Jim Wallis, who has zeroed in on eliminating poverty as the primary concern of Sojourners.
The negatives of this meeting of Baptists included the absence of significant representatives from African-American denominations, even though the gathering was planned to follow the meetings of two of America's largest African-American denominations, and was held in the very same convention hall. It was reported that many of the members of these two large groups of Baptists were unable to finance staying in Atlanta for an extra three days, which attending the meeting of the New Baptist Covenant required.
Another shortcoming of this gathering was that there was no clear-cut vision of what the next steps should be. There were important questions that were not answered. Is the New Baptist Covenant supposed to function as some kind of new informally-organized denomination? Is the call to care for the poor, so eloquently prescribed in the speeches, going to be translated into some specific programs? Will there be a team of leaders to give direction and some kind of organization to this New Baptist Covenant? It should be noted that the executives of the represented Baptist groups have an upcoming meeting planned, at which time these and other questions probably will be answered.
Whatever might have been the shortcomings and critiques of what transpired in Atlanta, however, there emerged clear evidence that this New Baptist Covenant could be the beginning of something very significant for Baptists. It could represent a movement that could transcend the partisan politics, too often evident among Southern Baptists, and could be a major step in moving Baptists into being a visible and viable partner with other mainstream denominations.
Jim Wallis talks with Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Harry Jackson (High Impact Leadership), and Sammy Rodriguez (National Hispanic Leadership Conference) about the broadening evangelical agenda. Watch it:
As the nation's second largest denomination (after the Roman Catholic Church), Southern Baptists have been given much, so their potential to do good is considerable - as is the danger of missing opportunities to do good. Sadly, until now, constituents and leaders of the 16-million-member Convention have tended to lag behind other large Christian communities when it comes to addressing the issue of environmental stewardship in general and climate change in particular. But that may be changing.
In 2007, the Convention took the positive step of passing a statement affirming the need for Baptists to care for creation, but a new group of Southern Baptists - including many notable Baptist leaders - have said the statement was too timid: it could be interpreted by "the world," they said, as "uncaring, reckless and ill-informed." Through the new declaration, "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change," these leaders are calling Baptists to keep moving forward in care and healing for God's precious planet. Jonathan Merritt, a young leader who helped inspire the new declaration, expressed his motivation in language that resonates deeply with Southern Baptists: to trash this beautiful planet - which is God's handiwork and declares God's glory - is like tearing out pages from the Bible.
True, many SBC notables have not yet signed the new statement. But current Convention president Frank Page did, along with 43 other exemplary SBC leaders including Ed Stetzer, Larissa Arnault, David Clark, Timothy George, John Hammett, Darrin Patrick, Jonathan Merritt, and two previous Convention presidents, Jack Graham and James Merritt. Their website (www.baptistcreationcare.org) has room for additional signatories, so we may see the center of gravity shift further toward environmental responsibility in the coming days and weeks.
This step is important for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, when a group as large and influential as the SBC accepts increasing moral responsibility for better care of the planet, the birds of the air and flowers of the field will benefit, as will all our children and grandchildren. Not only that, but by taking more seriously what I call the prosperity crisis (that our kind of prosperity is unsustainable in relation to the planet, thus reducing the prosperity of future generations), the SBC helps shift the larger evangelical community toward greater environmental responsibility. This shift has been gaining momentum in recent years in large part due to the good work of Jim Ball and the Evangelical Environmental Network (LINK).
Building on this momentum, evangelical Christians, with obvious influence in the Republican party and growing participation in the Democratic party, can increasingly join other Christian communities in being strong advocates for better environmental policy in the U.S. at large, whoever is our next president and whichever party controls the next Congress. By further shifting public opinion in the nation that consumes disproportionate amounts of resources and produces disproportionate amounts of greenhouse gases, members of the SBC can play a greater role in helping our nation move from being a global laggard to a global leader in this important moment of danger and opportunity.
I frequently hear from young Southern Baptists who express deep frustration with the ethos and image projected by some of their leaders in recent years: they want their denomination to rise above the old polarities of left and right, choosing transcendent Biblical values over ideological and partisan alignments. The current and future signatories of this statement will give young Southern Baptists something to be proud of - and that's no small thing.
Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is board chair for Sojourners. He writes and speaks about the intersection of faith and global crises.
On this Super Tuesday, there will no doubt be a lot of discussion (again) about the role of religion – and especially evangelical religion - in the election cycle. I wish more of them had the intelligence of a recent piece by NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof.
Speaking of evangelicals, Kristoff said:
Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock. ... Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives.
Kristof quotes The Great Awakening, where Jim Wallis says, "Evangelicals are going to vote this year in part on climate change, on Darfur, on poverty." Kristof then adds that, according to a CBS News poll, this year white evangelicals consider the fight against poverty to be the top moral issue, displacing abortion to a distant second.
I could see this shift in action a few weeks ago in Davos at the World Economic Forum. I got to see Rick Warren in action, motivating business and political leaders to put poverty, disease, and peace-making higher on their agenda. Kristof tells a story about Warren, who for many years didn't pay much attention to these issues of social justice and compassion. Then, during a 2003 visit to Africa, Rick came into a ramshackle tent where a little church was caring for 25 AIDS orphans.
Rick said, "I realized they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch. ... It was like a knife in the heart." Kristof recounts how Rick turned this heartbreak into action: mobilizing his church to constructive action in 68 countries, recruiting 7,500 members to pay their own way to serve poor people around the world – experiencing a transformation in their own values and priorities in the process.
Kristoff quotes CARE's Helene Gayle about evangelicals' work against global poverty: they "have made some incredible contributions … We don't give them credit for the changes they've made." Similarly, Environmental Defense president Fred Krupp said, "Many evangelical leaders have been key to taking the climate issue across the cultural divide."
Kristof concludes, "In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians."
As an evangelical, I occasionally watch late-night religious broadcasting and the word "crazy" comes to mind in a different way. But thankfully, Kristoff is right: there's a new kind of craziness spreading among evangelicals. It's the belief that the impossible can happen – that yes, we can stop global warming, yes, we can redirect the economy to benefit the poor majority, and yes, we can build bridges of peace instead of razor-wire-topped walls of distrust.
It will be interesting to see how that craziness manifests itself in today's elections.
On Wednesday, Sojourners and Beliefnet, in collaboration with the National Association of Evangelicals Christian Student Leadership Conference, hosted a panel discussion on "Choosing a president: What do evangelicals really want?" I joined Steve Waldman and David Kuo of Beliefnet, Rich Cizik of the NAE, Bishop Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church and the High Impact Leadership Coalition, Lynne Hybels of the Willow Creek Community Church, Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland Church and former president of the Christian Coalition, Rev. Sam Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, and Rev. Cheryl Sanders of the Third Street Church of God and Howard University School of Divinity in a 90-minute conversation.
I was honored to be part of the group, and found the discussion informative and inspiring. I encourage you to listen to the entire conversation, but here are my favorite quotes from each of the panelists:
Rich Cizik: "An historic shift is occurring, it's equivalent to an earthquake in slow motion, but people aren't sensing it, the national media hasn't picked up on it … We are no longer single issue voters, and we're not going to blindly follow prominent leaders in the Religious Right, or otherwise, who are telling us what we have to believe."
Harry Jackson: "It's impossible, though, to be a conscience to the entire nation and be partisan as well. So, at some point we've lost our ability to be an impartial conscience to the entire nation."
Lynne Hybels: "It took a very unlikely prophet named Bono to shake me up. It really was a challenge from him that sent me to Africa and really turned my life upside down. It's a shame that it took an Irish rock star to call the church to task on this, but I'm really glad he did. … [In] many of the great global issues like poverty, AIDS, and refugees, women are disproportionately impacted by all these great social global tragedies, and I would like to see women become disproportionately engaged on the solution side. Personally, that is my call to evangelical women – to pay attention to what's going on in the world and get involved."
Joel Hunter: "There is now a maturing of the movement. Any movement starts out with a negative, you're against something. It's kind of like the middle-school years. You define yourself by what you hate, what you're not. And as you grow up, you have to start defining yourself by who you are and what you want to build. That's where we are right now."
Sam Rodriguez: "The major difference between Latino evangelicals and white evangelicals is that many white evangelicals take their marching orders from Bishop Rush Limbaugh, Prophet Sean Hannity, and Apostle Lou Dobbs; and Latino evangelicals still listen to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John."
Cheryl Sanders: "Martin Luther King made this point in his writing and his speeches – he was a Christian, he was a gospel-preaching Christian – and he brought that evangelical message – the social gospel, if we want to call it that – to bear on civil rights, his center of concern, but it included economic justice, health care, and so many of the other things we're concerned about today. … In the history of African Americans and the church, there hasn't really been a time when it was detached from the social and political message."
I am now beginning a 20-city tour to talk about my new book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in A Post-Religious Right America. The conversation at every stop will be about how real and deep change could happen in this country and around the world—and is already beginning to. And that change begins with our own lives, our congregations and communities, and the kind of social movements that finally move politics. I invite you to come to one of our events, here is detailed city-by-city information on the tour. I'm looking forward to meeting people all around the country to talk about the "revival" that is already occurring and could bring the change and the hope that so many people are clearly longing for in this critical election year and beyond.
I commend Pastor Nathan for the courage and commitment to truth required to publicly reconsider what has strangely become status quo in parts of the U.S. evangelical world - an almost "biblical immunity" and unconditional support granted to the modern nation state of Israel. I especially appreciated the way he offered a lens for even the most serious adherents of scriptural authority to theologically unravel Christian Zionism.
As he showed, the way forward depends neither on tossing certain passages aside, nor on citing them individually, but on viewing them in light of the overarching meta-narrative of the Bible and the general direction of God's redeeming history.
Although there is more that I said amen to than questioned in this sermon, I'll offer (humbly) some things he may want to consider as he continues, or expands this dialogue:
1. The role of the U.S. and Great Britain in helping establish the fledgling Zionist state. Many Americans just don't realize where Arab anti-American sentiment stems from because they're unaware of how their own country has operated (and continues to operate) in foreign affairs.
2. That Middle Eastern Christians, or "Arab" Christians, are not monolithic in their opinions on the creation of modern state of Israel. There are a great deal (probably most, actually) who did NOT support the initial establishment of an Israeli nation state, however limited in its borders, and even if they now support its security. This is often confused as anti-Semitism though it has more to do with the above point (about the assistance of Israel by western powers) and that Christian Arabs have lived side-by-side with their Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters for millennia without national separation. Many may also not view biblical justice as necessitating land ownership via a newly created nation-state.
3. That biblical justice is also linked to the idea of restitution, in the sense that he who commits the crime is the one expected to pay for it. The part in the sermon about biblical justice can also acknowledge that the horrendous mistreatment and annihilation of the Jews was not done by the Arabs of the East but by the Europeans of the West. Again, this doesn't necessarily mean that their homeland does not belong in the East, but there may be a rub (for Arabs) in implying that biblical justice would demand Easterners to pay (in land and lives) for the sins of Westerners. Of course, no ethnic group is ever totally innocent, but the presumptuousness of Western nations in applying solutions is a part of the problem for Arabs of all religious faiths.
4. Finally, under the last heading "What Christians should do" – I would add that one of the main things is for American Christians to get connected with the Palestinian church. One of the most powerful paradigm shifters is the realization for many U.S. Christians that Arab Christians (if they recognize their existence at all) are not a small fringe group who have been persecuted by Muslims. In the case of Palestinian Christians, there are (or were) hundreds of thousands. Christians blindly supporting U.S. foreign policy can take credit for shooting themselves in the virtual foot of Christ. For example, wouldn't it surprise most congregations to know that until recent years, in areas such as Bethlehem, Christians were the majority?
Deanna Murshed is director of integrated marketing for Sojourners
During the South Carolina Republican debate, Mike Huckabee garnered greatest applause when defending his views of wifely submission as part of his evangelical faith. The questioner quizzed Huckabee about being one of 131 signers of a 1998 USA Today ad by the Southern Baptist Convention that asserted, "a wife is to graciously submit herself to the servant leadership of her husband." Huckabee responded by saying "I am not the least bit ashamed of my faith." He joked that his own wife was not submissive and appeared to temper his original statement by affirming the idea of mutual submission in marriage (a view, by the way, specifically rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention).
Some evangelicals might find this acceptable, but many more do not—not to mention the American public as a whole. Over the last decade, the Pew Research Center has tracked a steady decrease of the impact of conservative religion on views of gender. In 1997, 28 percent of Americans strongly disagreed with the idea that women should return to "traditional roles." In 2007, 42 percent strongly disagreed with the same statement. One wonders how many Protestant Christians—evangelical and otherwise—are included in that 42 percent.
If the media thinks that Huckabee's views represent evangelical Christianity, they are wrong. Wifely submission is only one interpretation of scripture and not without significant criticism by biblical scholars and theologians. American evangelicalism has a long and conflicted record about its views of women, with egalitarianism as the alternative to submission. This week's other major news story—Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire primary victory—provides an instructive historical lesson about that evangelical alternative.
Hillary Clinton is not, of course, an "evangelical" using the current definition. She is a mainline United Methodist. However, she graduated Wellesley College. Although few would think of contemporary Wellesley as in any way evangelical, the school's 19th century heritage was that of evangelical feminism.
Henry and Pauline Durant founded Wellesley in 1871 (first classes held in 1875) as a distinctly evangelical institution. Henry, a wealthy lawyer, had become a lay-evangelist with a vision for a women's college that "will be Christian in its influence, discipline, and course of instruction." At the groundbreaking of Wellesley's first building, Mrs. Durant gave every workman a Bible as a gift before she placed another Bible in the cornerstone. The cornerstone prayer reads:
This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything ... that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ.
All of Wellesley's early professors were required to teach the Bible along with their regular subjects; all trustees were obligated to be active members of evangelical churches. Revivalist Dwight L. Moody served as a trustee and ardently supported the school and his friends, the Durants, in their endeavor.
The Durants not only preached the gospel—they were equally committed to the "cause of God's poor." They believed that universal childhood education was the key to alleviating poverty and that medical care needed to be widely available to the indigent. The Wellesley evangelicals believed that women were as capable as men in every field, with one exception: religious matters. When it came to religion, they believed that women were superior to men. In 1880, Noah Porter, Yale College president, addressed Wellesley women praising that superiority while warning them that such giftedness exposed them to "unreasoning fanaticism and tenacious bigotry."
Wellesley women took this all quite seriously. Submitting to no one, these young evangelical women became scholars, professors, theologians, pastors, missionaries, teachers, doctors, and lawyers across the globe. Although the Wellesley of Hillary Rodham Clinton's day had become secularized, the feminist legacy of 19th century evangelicalism continued to influence its priorities—full equality for women, quality childhood education for all, universal access to health care, and a passion for the poor.
The upcoming primary in South Carolina will be critical for both the Democrats and the Republicans, say the media pundits. And South Carolina is full of evangelicals, they also say. But they have absolutely no clue about what that means.
For example, the exit polls in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary have asked departing Republican voters if they are "evangelicals," but they don't ask the same question of exiting Democrats—therefore assuming there aren't any evangelicals voting for Democrats, an assumption that is demonstrably not true. The leading Democrats in the race—Obama, Clinton, and Edwards—speak explicitly and articulately as Christians and their campaigns have reached out as much to faith communities as the Republicans have.
The media experts on religion then go on to explain to us that evangelicals care mostly or only about abortion and gay marriage, and not about other issues. That is even more mistaken. The issues that most concern evangelicals today, especially a younger generation, include poverty, the environment and climate change, human rights, and the morality of a foreign policy where war is the first resort. This year those issues are drawing a growing number of evangelicals to consider the Democratic candidates.
By omitting the question of evangelical/born-again identification from the Democratic polls, you prevented the public from seeing the full picture of how the bipartisan courtship of evangelical voters affected the outcome of the first contest of the 2008 campaign and perpetuated the misperception that all evangelical Christians are Republicans. No party can own any faith. Evangelicals have broadened their agenda to include care for the planet, the poor and the stranger, and as a result are increasingly diverse politically.
One of the leading Republicans, of course, is Mike Huckabee, who is also an outspoken evangelical. Huckabee recently spoke to Reuters about the broadening evangelical agenda:
Unquestionably there is a maturing that is going on within the evangelical movement. It doesn't mean that evangelicals are any less concerned about traditional families and the sanctity of life. It just means that they also realize that we have real responsibility in areas like disease and hunger and poverty and that these are issues that people of faith have to address.
Yet the media, which is paying such close attention to Huckabee, doesn't seem to pay any attention to that. You might conclude that the media still just doesn't understand much about religion and the enormous changes taking place among evangelicals in particular. So far, the media analysts and prognosticators about South Carolina are about as accurate and credible as their insightful and confident predictions about the expected results from the New Hampshire primary. Will the media celebrities ever really listen to the American people or just tell us how we are going to vote? Religion could, indeed, play a major role in the outcome of the South Carolina primary, on both sides of the aisle. But our non-stop talking heads in the media parallel universe and the professional polling truth inventors haven't got a clue about how.
The Nov. 27 Annapolis meeting on Israel/Palestine has launched us into a momentous one-year process to seek a permanent peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors. What is at stake is whether after more than 50 years of ghastly conflict and widespread bloodshed, genuine peace can come to one of the most dangerous areas and most divisive problems in our world.
Important steps were taken at Annapolis. The leaders of Israel and Palestine publicly pledged to negotiate a permanent peace before President Bush leaves office. They have promised to meet personally every two weeks. And the U.S., especially Condoleezza Rice, is committed to working vigorously to use America's enormous influence to facilitate the process.
Not everyone is pleased. Christians United for Israel totally oppose any plan in which Israel gives up any land to a Palestinian State (an essential component of a final peace). CUFI has already publicly protested the Annapolis meeting and will certainly organize a segment of the evangelical world to oppose a two-state solution.
Fortunately, CUFI represents only a minority of American evangelicals. I am sure that a majority of evangelical leaders agree with the new "An Evangelical Statement on Israel/Palestine," released on Nov. 28, signed by more than 80 evangelical leaders who endorse a two-state solution and call on evangelical Christians to encourage, pray for, and support all the leaders working to reach this historic goal (go to ESA's website to read the statement and add your signature).
CUFI is already bombarding the White House with letters opposing this peace effort. We must mobilize those evangelicals (a majority of the evangelical world, I am sure) that do support a two-state solution to make its voice known now.
On Friday, Nov. 30, I was on Bill Moyers' Journal (Public Affairs Television) to talk about what evangelicals think about a two-state solution.
Clearly some initial important steps have been taken. But genuine programs will only happen if the U.S. vigorously pushes both Israelis and Palestinians. I believe Condoleezza Rice wants to do that.
Now is the time to tell the president you want him to redouble his efforts to promote a permanent peace between Israel and Palestine. Sign the new statement, write the White House, and tell your congressional representatives to push hard for peace in the Holy Land.
Ron Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action, a professor and director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a member of the Red Letter Christians.
In what may be the defining moment of his campaign, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a Mormon, addressed the issue of faith and its bearing on his pursuit of the presidency. Pundits inevitably compared Romney's speech in College Station, Texas, with the speech that John F. Kennedy gave just down the road at the Rice Hotel, Houston, on September 12, 1960.
The parallels are unmistakable. Both men felt compelled to address what was openly discussed as the "religious issue" in 1960. Both men were reared in a tradition different from Protestantism, which claims the allegiance of at least a plurality (if not a majority) of Americans.
But the parallels end there. Unlike Mormonism, Roman Catholicism was well known to most Americans in 1960, although many Protestants had a jaundiced view of the Roman Catholic Church. Many Americans, by contrast, know little about Mormonism, officially named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many Americans see Mormons as strange and secretive; their temples, for instance, are closed to "gentiles" (non-Mormons). The Mormon notion of God as both male and female, baptism for the dead, and even the practice of wearing Mormon underwear (thought by many to have protective powers) strike many as unorthodox, if not downright bizarre.
For evangelicals, some tenets of Mormonism are particularly troubling. Mormons accept the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament as divinely inspired, but they believe that the Book of Mormon, discovered by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in 1827, is similarly inspired. And Mormons believe that the president of the Latter-day Saints is the conduit for continuing inspiration. Evangelicals, on the other hand, view the Bible (Old and New Testaments), as the "word of God" and their sole religious authority. For another religious group to add to the canon of scripture strikes most evangelicals as utter blasphemy.
These suspicions do not augur well for Romney. Politically conservative evangelical voters are a core constituency for the Republican Party. In order to win the Republican nomination, Romney needs the support of conservative evangelicals, especially in Iowa.
Throughout the early months of the campaign, Romney sought to downplay his faith, protesting that he was not a spokesman for Mormonism. But many voters, evangelicals especially, have not been mollified – which led him to the dais of the George Bush Library in Texas this morning to deliver his "JFK speech."
Two of the most compelling arguments central to Kennedy's speech in 1960, however, are not available to Romney. Kennedy unequivocally affirmed his "absolute" support for the separation of church and state, and he also foreswore government support for religious schools. Romney cannot echo those positions. Leaders in the Religious Right preach that the First Amendment separation of church and state is a "myth," and seek taxpayer support for church-related schools.
So in the end, Romney was reduced to bromides about religious liberty and "family values." (Mormons are good at "family values.")
Ironically, Romney missed the opportunity to make his best case for a Mormon to be president. Mormons believe that America's charter documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are actually divinely inspired. After seven years of an administration that views the Constitution as a nuisance, many Americans, I suspect, would welcome a president who sought to defend the integrity of the Constitution rather than subvert it.
Here's some of Krista Tippet's introduction to her interview with Jim:
I've resisted interviewing Wallis as he's risen to a new kind of fame, in part because he has had so much exposure in major media - from Hardball to Fresh Air. But now I've come to see in Jim Wallis' rise not just a story of an individual activist becoming a leader, but of the world changing around us.
...
There is plentiful evidence that younger people, including younger evangelical Christians, share Jim Wallis's concern for the poor and the dispossessed, for inequities in global economy and ecology. Half of his audiences across the country these days, as he tells it, are under 30. He does not claim to represent a majority of American evangelicals in his views and positions, but he does draw packed crowds of young evangelicals at Christian colleges. He urges them to emulate the 19th-century evangelicals who inspire him, some of whom founded today's Christian colleges — abolitionists and social reformers who took their Bibles and their God with the utmost seriousness.
After the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980s, and again after the 2000 and 2004 elections, some prophesied that the U.S. was headed for "theocracy" — a takeover by conservative religious ruling elites. What is happening instead is what Time magazine has called the leveling of "the praying field." Conservative Christianity hasn't disappeared, but it is increasingly met, and measured, by progressive and liberal religious voices in politics and beyond.
There are also conservative evangelicals with a broadened political and social agenda and a willingness to form coalitions with diverse religious and secular others to combat urgent human crises.
A major voice in the roundtable was Jeff Sharlet, a confessed non-evangelical whom top evangelical organizations might be wise to hire - and quick - as a consultant. As an outsider, he sees what a lot that us insiders need to see: that it's time to augment our deeply-held concern for private morality with a new vision for addressing systemic injustice. I'm both hopeful and increasingly confident that for the next generation of evangelicals, this augmentation is already happening. For example, for the next generation of evangelicals, care for the planet is already a key moral issue with both personal and social dimensions, because they see in our "creation mandate" a call to steward the earth for a) our creator (not an insignificant concern!), b) our grandchildren's grandchildren (and undervalued family value to be sure), c) our poor and vulnerable neighbors from Bangladesh to Darfur, and d) our fellow creatures with whom we share the land, sea, and air.
Michael Lindsay offered an appropriate last word that implies a critical question:
If evangelicals end up merely using politics for sectarian aims, we will all be worse off. Their gospel will be less attractive to non-Christians. Other religious groups will feel increasingly marginalized. Faith will be seen as another tool for manipulating the public. So history will have to be the judge of whether this [recent resurgence of evangelical political power] has been merely the triumph of another interest group or if the evangelical ascendancy has contributed to a more enlightened democracy, where engaged citizens use their faith to serve the common good.
"The common good" – there's that phrase that seems to be coming up more and more lately. Could it be nestled, next to love for God, right at the heart of what Jesus meant by "gospel of the kingdom of God?" Could this more holistic, integral gospel be the common ground and higher ground where evangelicals and others can come together in these fractious times?
To flip Lindsay's assessment around, if evangelicals "use their faith to serve the common good," then we will all be better off. This is the hope many of us share with roundtable participant David Kuo, a hope rooted in the conviction "that the gospel of Jesus is so life-transforming, so utterly staggering, that to put that gospel into action through sacrificially loving their neighbor would change the world."
In light of Pat Robertson's and Bob Jones III's recent presidential endorsements – shocking or predictable, depending on your cynicism factor – and in light of the recent New York Times article on the fragmentation of evangelicalism, I'm sure we'll be seeing a growing number of assessments regarding the status and future of the evangelical Christian community in the U.S. Those interested in the subject shouldn't miss the conversation that's been going on over at the Beliefnet roundtable on evangelicals in power. Beliefnet's Patton Dodd got things rolling, and was joined by writers Hannah Rosin and Jeff Sharlet, Left Behind novelist Jerry Jenkins, sociologist Michael Lindsay, and former Bush aide David Kuo.
All participants agreed on the need for civil and substantive discourse on the relation between faith and public life. Not only did they agree on the need for it, but they practiced it. Stark disagreement didn't give way to name-calling or vilification; civility didn't generate into a surfacey niceness that fogs up disagreement. I can only hope that future conversations on this topic will follow the civil and substantive tone of this one.
I especially appreciated the fresh tone struck by evangelicals David Kuo and Jerry Jenkins. Jenkins, in particular, shatters stereotypes by what he says and how he says it; one can only hope that those who loved his novels will follow his lead when he says things like this:
The true evangelical leaders, to me, are those serving Jesus (for He said that if you feed the hungry, help the poor, etc., doing this "unto the least of these," you're doing it unto Me) behind the scenes. Fortunately, I know many such servants - sadly, or perhaps encouragingly, most of them are young people. My son and his wife (in their early thirties with three young children) have helped started a church in Venice Beach, California, that largely serves minorities and the homeless. Just a few dozen gather Sunday mornings for a joyous celebration, but during the week they are also ministered to in concrete ways. My son and daughter-in-law, despite the fact that he's a movie director and she's a full-time mom, are in the process of adopting another child (and possibly two), believing that this is another way to put their faith into action.
One feels the center of gravity shifting in a statement like this from an evangelical leader like this. I share Jerry's hope when I look at many younger leaders in what is often called "the emerging church." Guided by "true evangelical leaders" like Karen Ward, Shane Claiborne, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Rob Bell, Danielle Shroyer, Adam Taylor, Gabriel Salguero, and others, this new generation of Christian adults will not be driving their parents' generation's evangelical Buick. They'll be serving the least of these - planting churches in inner cities, adopting forgotten children, and working for justice.
At its board meeting last month, the National Association of Evangelicals formally named Leith Anderson as its president. Anderson is senior pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and has been serving as interim president of the NAE for the past year.
I've had the opportunity to spend some time with Leith Anderson. I believe he is the kind of leader most needed these days, both for the NAE and for the wider evangelical community. He has both the heart of a pastor and the passion of a prophet, and he finds ways to be true to his convictions and be committed to bridge-building.
There is no shortage of evangelicals that have passion about every topic in contemporary life. The challenge here is not to find people who are interested. There are plenty of people who are interested. It's, How do we unite evangelicals in understanding what the issues are and having a moral perspective in how we approach them?
And, in developing that moral perspective, he noted
We have a document that is called "For the Health of the Nation." They are seven priorities that the NAE organizes around in terms of being a public voice.
[The document] relates to religious freedom, sanctity of human life, human rights, and creation care. It was first issued in 2003 and then reaffirmed by the NAE in March of this year. What we're doing is organizing many of the activities of the Washington office and the association around each one. These are big topics like justice and compassion for the poor and the vulnerable.
On immigration reform, one of the most controversial issues in America today, Anderson said,
I'm hoping that in the future we are also going to be able to engage more on the issue of immigration in America. It's a pressing issue that the country needs to unite around. We need to have a biblical voice. We need to recognize this is a high concern for the Hispanic community, which has a large numbers of evangelicals within it. Hispanic churches are the fastest growing in the nation and immigration is a top priority. Up to this point, NAE has not made any formal statements on it. I just anticipate this will be a growing priority and concern which fits under the topic of justice.
I congratulate Leigh Anderson on his new position, and look forward to working with him.
I have had some respectful debate with Chuck Colson in the past, but I can't help but applaud - with a standing ovation, actually - his recent statement about the environment. True, his statement could be cynically judged as an attempt to help certain evangelicals save face - in particular, evangelicals who have been anti-environment on the basis of not believing the growing scientific data about global warming - too often supported by truly sketchy biblical proof texting. But in the interest of saving the planet, and saving millions of lives in it, I'm all for anyone saving face who needs to do so. We are, after all, in a faith that is all about saving love.
But for Christians, the question of global warming should not stop us from identifying a critical worldview issue here—one on which every Christian can, or should, agree: and that's the importance of good stewardship toward the rest of creation. There are things we can do now to be good stewards that do not require us to get all of the answers that are going to come on global warming.
Later, he asks:
Can you think of one instance where Scripture praises excessive consumption or waste?
And concludes:
I can't ... Working with institutions to reduce their energy usage ... is good stewardship. And it does not depend on what the scientists eventually can prove about global warming. It is all laid out for us already in the scriptures.
Chuck is spot on. The truth is, large sectors of our religion have become "worldly" in a subtle but powerful way: we have been guilty of an unholy but socially acceptable syncretism between our faith and consumerism. One can't help but applaud Colson's desire to address this compromise.
In my recent book, Everything Must Change, I describe our consumerist system as "insane and suicidal," tempting us to:
act as though the resources we consume are infinite and the wastes we produce are invisible. Just as our bodies consume food and produce excrement, in this economy we consume trees and produce smoke, consume clean air and produce smog. ...
Socially ... we consume time and produce fatigue; consume art and talent and produce entertainment and amusement; consume work and leisure and produce paychecks and heart attacks. And ultimately we consume communities and produce extended families; consume extended families and produce nuclear families; consume nuclear families and produce individuals; consume individuals and produce consumers; and finally, consume consumers themselves and produce disembodied fragments called 'wants' and 'needs' and 'markets' and segments' and 'anxieties' and 'drives' that the economy consumes and excretes and reconsumes in a kind of cannibalistic ferment or rot.
A social system thus based on consumption and excretion, I conclude, can aptly be described as an "excrement factory." One can only thank God that Colson is adding his voice and influence to a call for a better way of living - a life of careful stewardship rather than careless consumption and excretion. May we, as Colson says, "stop arguing long enough to start being good stewards today." Amen, Chuck Colson!
On Friday, Oct. 26, I was part of a small delegation of evangelical leaders who met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. We were there to follow up the letter we sent to President Bush in late July to encourage more vigorous U.S. efforts to promote a fair, two-state solution for Israel/Palestine.
Secretary Rice understands the formidable obstacles. She spoke of a little moment of opportunity, but she also underlined the urgency. If the Palestinians do not soon have a realistic prospect of their own state for the near future, the extremists will take over the Palestinian cause and things will be much worse. The Arab states are frightened at the danger of a stronger Hamas backed by Iran. Both the Israeli and Palestinian leaders know that the window of opportunity for realizing a two-state solution will not remain open very long.
Secretary Rice indicated very clearly that the support of evangelical leaders for a negotiated agreement that would provide security, peace, and economic opportunity for two independent states is enormously helpful. She also said that the necessary compromises by both sides on the details are clear and available. What we need is a psychological breakthrough.
I am convinced that Secretary Rice is investing her very best resources and efforts to move the dialogue forward toward a just, permanent, two-state solution. She needs our prayers and our vigorous support.
The group that met with her last Friday has plans in the works to rally evangelicals to support a two-state solution. You will hear more of that in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, read and share the letter we sent to President Bush in July with your friends. Urge them to sign it. And pray regularly and fervently that God will guide all the relevant governments - especially those of Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. - to seek the paths that make for a just peace for everyone in Israel/Palestine.
Ron Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action, a professor and director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a member of the Red Letter Christians.
The cover story of yesterday's New York Times Magazine is a long feature by reporter David Kirkpatrick on The Evangelical Crackup. It's a comprehensive look at how the evangelical landscape is changing – theologically and politically. He begins by noting:
Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for reelection by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party.
But now,
another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.
Contributing to this change:
a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus' teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.
Kirkpatrick notes the theological importance of these changes:
Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelical's theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft — a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft. But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers — take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of "spiritual formation" that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.
And the political implications:
Today the president's support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president's approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush's biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they've become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)
I could quote much more – it's a carefully-researched and well-written piece, but that's enough to give the general theme. Everywhere I speak, I come to the same conclusion as Bill Hybels told Kirkpatrick: "People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening."
The name "Red Letter Christians" is catching on! Increasingly within the Christian community (and even in the general public), people are becoming aware of the growing number of us who are basically evangelical in our theology but who shy away from designating ourselves as "evangelicals." They know us to be Christians with a high view of scripture, who affirm the doctrines of the Apostles' Creed, and who believe that salvation comes from surrendering our hearts, minds, and souls to the resurrected Christ — but are reluctant to call ourselves evangelicals. They realize that is because the label "evangelical" has come to be almost synonymous with the "Religious Right." While holding to the same theology as evangelicals, we do not want to be known as being anti-gay, anti-environment, pro-war, anti-feminist, and pro-gun — all of which have been pinned on all evangelicals (perhaps unjustly) by the secular media.
There are critics who do not like our name, nor agree with our progressive social agenda. In the October issue of Christianity Today, there was an editorial in which the columnist explained what he thought was wrong with becoming Red Letter Christians. What was interesting in his critique was that he got us right! He grasped what we were all about – and with great effectiveness. First of all, he described us as people who, when we go to the voting booth, ask whether or not a candidate's tax policies serve the interests of the rich to the detriment of the poor, whether or not there should be policies to stop global warming, and if he or she supports Bush's war policies. See what I mean? He understands us perfectly! They are exactly the kind of questions we believe Red Letter Christians should be asking when they vote.
The second criticism leveled at us in that CT editorial was that by calling ourselves Red Letter Christians, we were giving priority to the words of Jesus, suggesting that what he taught makes earlier teachings in scripture secondary, if not inferior. Again, he has us right!
We believe that the Sermon on the Mount presents a morality that is superior to the justice proposed by Moses. But then, Jesus himself said as much. He is the one who said that while Moses allowed for divorce and remarriage that he had a higher law, and that while the retributive justice of the Hebrew Testament proposed "an eye for an eye" and "a tooth for a tooth," that his new commandment was to love our enemies and overcome evil with good.
Surely, the CT columnist does not intend to put the purity codes of Moses, with all of their kosher regulations, on par with the morality of the red letters in the Bible.
I think we're on to something, and it may be soon that those evangelicals who do not want to be lumped together with Religious Right ideologies soon will be adopting this new name. There is a growing number of evangelicals who, when they find out what we're all about, will say, "That's what we think, too!"
Who made the following statement in a recent television interview?
I'm not sure that that group in Washington is really representative of evangelicals across the spectrum. This is the Family Research Council and some of the James Dobson supporters, I just think that's just a narrow slice of evangelical thought.
A) Jim Wallis
B) Pat Robertson
C) Hillary Clinton
C) Rick Warren
D) Rudy Giuliani
Drumroll ... the answer is B) Pat Robertson! Dan at FPL will soon tell me to do my own research and stop ripping off his posts, but I just couldn't pass this one up. In the context of the original video segment it's a little unclear exactly what Pat meant by this statement - though my guess is that he's saying the FRC Summit represents only a slice of evangelical thought about which Republican candidate to support.
Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the web editor for Sojourners.
I'm grateful to Tony Perkins and FRC Action for hosting the Oct. 19 dialogue focused on the "values" for values voters. I also thank Richard Land, my frequent dialogue partner and friend. I believe we found areas of real agreement and also healthy disagreement - and that is good.
We both agreed that the issue is not whether faith should help to shape our public life, but how.
I believe that Christians across the political spectrum might have more common concerns than people think - and potential common ground - on critical issues.
First, there are biblical principles of the kingdom of God on which we can agree.
Second, there are prudential judgments on policies where there is room for disagreement and deeper dialogue
Third, we must make sure our faith trumps ideology. For me, that often means making sure that my faith challenges the Left. And as I said to you on Friday, most of you probably don't have that problem! But how can you make sure that your faith challenges the Right?
And together, as Richard and I both try to do, we should challenge those who wish to banish religion from the public square.
On what do we agree?
We all agree that faith plays an important role in public life; faith is personal but never private. But as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The church should not be the master or the servant of the state, but the conscience of the state." King also never endorsed a candidate but made them endorse his agenda. There's a lesson for us in that.
Red and blue, Left and Right, are not biblical categories. They are political ones, and religious people don't easily fit the labels - nor should we. God's politics resists ideology and often calls us to transcend our narrow political categories and place our commonality as Christians above any political allegiance or identification with a political party.
God is not a Republican or a Democrat. The people of God must not be in the pocket of any political party. There is a great danger in being too close to either side and not maintaining our critical prophetic distance. We should be the ultimate swing vote, judging all the candidates by our moral compass.
Presidential candidates were at your conference seeking your vote, and you took a straw poll which became the center of media attention in their coverage of your gathering. But let me suggest that if your favorite candidate wins (whoever that turns out to be), they will not be able to really change the biggest moral issues of our time unless there is a movement from outside to continue pushing them. Remember, Lyndon Johnson did not become a civil rights leader until a faith-based civil rights movement made him one.
When politics fails to resolve the great moral issues, social movements often rise up to change politics - and the best social movements have spiritual foundations. We have been divided, but perhaps we can find ways we might work together in the future on the greatest moral issues of our time.
In the spirit of the great social movements that Christians have helped to lead—abolition of slavery, child labor laws, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement—we might do it again.
The more we look like our evangelical foreparents, the more we see our faith as the spark for social justice, the more faithful and united we could be.
And this is the key: The biblical prophets tell us that God judges societies not by their gross national product, their military strength, or their cultural dominance, but by their justice and righteousness - especially how they treat the weak and vulnerable.
We know there are multiple threats to human life and dignity that suggest a new moral agenda that could bring us together:
Strengthening marriage and families
Renewing the moral fabric of our culture
Overcoming extreme global poverty and disease, as well as unnecessary poverty at home
Ending human trafficking
Healing the wounds of racism
Protecting God's creation
Finding a better path to national and global security
Advancing a consistent ethic of the sanctity of life
If those we could agree on these basic principles, we could reshape American politics - and, with God's help, we might change some of the big things that politics has been unable to.
As for politics in an election year, the Catholic Bishops have some good advice for us. They counsel Christians to be:
political but not partisan
principled but not ideological
clear but also civil
engaged but not used
Because, above all, (back to where we started) we are called to be faithful to the principles of the kingdom of God.
Last evening I attended a reception and dinner in Washington for evangelical Christian leaders, which is not an unusual event here. But the topic and, especially, the main speaker would seem highly unusual to many. The event, called "A Global Leaders Forum," was hosted by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Micah Challenge, a global advocacy campaign focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are aimed at cutting extreme global poverty in half by 2015. The topics that brought 250 evangelical leaders together from around the U.S. and world were indeed global poverty and the urgent issue of climate change. Both issues are now firmly on the agenda of the evangelical mainstream, as last night's impressive list of leaders demonstrated.
The speaker for the evening was none other than Ban-Ki Moon, the new secretary general of the United Nations, which is driving the MDG initiative. Growing up in the evangelical world, I remember the great debate about who was the real "Antichrist" as described in biblical prophecy--it was either the pope or the United Nations. As Washington Post writer Dana Milbanks noted this morning
In the wildly popular Left Behind series of evangelical Christian novels, the Antichrist takes the form of the secretary general of the United Nations, sets up an abortion-promoting world government and becomes the Global Community Supreme Potentate. Last night, the National Association of Evangelicals met for dinner at the Sheraton in Crystal City. The keynote speaker? Why, the Antichrist himself.
Last night, the supposed Antichrist was listening to gospel music, speaking of his own faith, quoting scripture, celebrating a new alliance with "the evangelical church" on the critical issues of poverty and global warming, and bringing the conservative Christian crowd to its feet in smiling agreement with the secretary's agenda.
Indeed, leader after leader insisted this was a biblical agenda. A prominent leader from the Religious Right came up to sit right next to me, and then engaged me in an amazing conversation about finding common ground. This dramatic shift in the public agenda of the evangelical community is affecting American politics in very significant ways and promises to change them, especially if the political labels of left and right slowly slip away and are replaced by a common commitment to focus on the key moral issues of our time. Those issues are now defined more broadly and deeply than before and include the plight of God's poorest children and the fragile state of God's creation.
As the Religious Right has diminished in influence, many are searching for a new political agenda that doesn’t fit the standard right/left battles of American politics and is more consistent with their deeply held values. That new agenda would be good news for the majority of Americans who are alienated by the political extremes and are hungry - not for a soulless centrism - but for a new moral center in our public life.
To ground that new agenda, we need a better understanding of the role of faith in public life. Political appeals - even if rooted in religious convictions - must be argued on moral grounds, rather than as sectarian religious demands, so that the people (citizens), whether religious or not, may have the capacity to hear and respond. Religion must be disciplined by democracy and contribute to a better and more moral public discourse. Religious convictions must therefore be translated into moral arguments, which must win the political debate if they are to be implemented. Religious people don’t get to win just because they are religious (in a nation that is often claimed to be a Judeo-Christian country). They, like any other citizens, have to convince their fellow citizens that what they propose is best for the common good—for all of us and not just for the religious. Clearly, part of the work to be done includes teaching religious people how to make their appeals in moral language, and secular people not to fear such appeals will lead to theocracy.
The public discussion about and between evangelicals and progressives has been dominated by too many false choices and too much mutual misunderstanding. It is time to work for common ground on some of our most critical issues. We must address a compelling vision to the many Americans who are actually more “purple,” than “red” or “blue.” What could evoke their convictions, reflect their values, summon their commitments, and change America? What would a broader and deeper moral politics or values politics begin to look like?
An important step toward those goals was taken yesterday with the release of “ Come Let Us Reason Together ” by the Third Way culture program. I applaud this effort by Third Way to develop common ground.
In a section on the role of faith in public life and politics, the paper outlines three “basic principles as a first step in bridging the divide over the role of religion in American public life:"
Respect for religious beliefs and religious diversity is vital for a healthy society.
Religion plays an appropriate public, not just private, role in American life.
All citizens have a constitutionally protected right to articulate the religious or moral basis of their political views in the public sphere, and protecting these expressions does not conflict with a commitment to the non-establishment of religion.
The heart of the paper, “Come Let Us Reason Together” provides significant common ground with a “ Shared Vision on Five Divisive Cultural Issues” – affirming the human dignity of gay and lesbian people, reducing the need for abortion, placing responsible moral limits on the treatment of human embryos, creating safe spaces for children online, and encouraging responsible fatherhood. The authors explain:
In this section, we have taken five key cultural areas and identified common ground in order to show that it is possible to have conversations even on some of the toughest issues. Beyond promoting sound policy for the nation, our hope is to help evangelicals and progressives move beyond mutual distrust on cultural issues to respectful civic partnerships that operate on the assumption of good faith even in the midst of disagreement. This reconfiguration makes a significant contribution to a more civil democratic dialogue and serves as a foundation for progress on the toughest issues.
The paper concludes:
In order for this paper to bear more fruit, both progressives and evangelicals will need to continue the hard work of reasoning together. We do not conclude that these conversations will be easy or that the paper’s proposals in themselves will resolve all the real disagreements and tensions on cultural issues. But we believe that the gap need not be as wide and the mistrust need not run as deep.
Progressives and evangelicals are people who care deeply about the justice and health of our society, and potential alliances between us on key issues could provide a genuine convergence for the common good. This paper was endorsed by a wide range of religious leaders, and I look forward to the “hard work of reasoning together” in further conversations.
In two recent posts, The Global Church and America's War, and Iraq and Christian Identity, I talked about the difference between the perceptions of U.S. Christians and our sisters and brothers around the world. I recently received a powerful e-mail from a Pastor Kuruvilla Chandy of Grace Bible Church, Lucknow, India, who describes himself as "a born again Christian" who supported the Cold War and "as a believer in prophecy, [is] in general agreement about supporting Israel." Hardly the profile of a left-wing Bush-basher. I'd like to share some of what he wrote.
President George Bush is the darling of most born again Christians in the US of A. But in India many regard him as a liability to the Christian cause. His identification as a believer and his advocacy of the war that the rest of the world regards as unjust has embarrassed Christians who are in a minority in India.
He is not just critical of Bush, but has strong words of both challenge and encouragement for believers in the U.S.:
People will never agree on whether or not Bush is an aggressor. That really depends on political views.... Christians living in America, suffering from fear aroused by 9/11 and desiring their own self-preservation and prosperity will approve of Bush's war against Iraq and look for ways to justify it even from a biblical viewpoint. It is heartening though to see that there are born again Christians, even in the U.S., who are opposed to the warmongering and see the war as something they have been unable to support precisely because of their faith in Christ. However the vast majority of Americans, especially those who describe themselves as born again Christians, are solidly in support of Bush, and even question the Christian identity and commitment of those who disapprove of Bush.
He further describes the connection between Bush's faith and Bush's war:
In effect, Bush has given Christ a bad name. As a Christian writer in India, I wrote an article arguing that Bush's war had nothing to do with his being a born again Christian, and all to do with his being the American President (Times of India April 7, Lucknow, April 21, 2003). The only problem is that somehow his aggressive American-ness has been identified with his being a Christian. But we in India cannot see the war as the work of a Christian. In this regard, I represent the view of most Christians in India.
In my article I essentially defended born again Christianity as what is practiced by Christians who are committed to Christ and take His teachings seriously. I am myself a born again Christian. I did not deny that, just because Bush had made being a born again Christian unpopular. Being a born again Christian has nothing to do with Bush. It has all to do with following Christ faithfully with a desire to make Him known. In the Indian context it was necessary to show what born again Christianity really stood for. I had to demonstrate that being a Christian did not mean approving Bush's war.
Perhaps even more sad than the damage Bush has done to the cause of Christ globally is the response of Christians in the U.S.:
I also circulated the article among Christian friends in the U.S., to share my concern as a Christian from a country where Christians are a minuscule minority. I shared it with my friends in America trying to somehow influence Christian opinion in the U.S. Suddenly I lost friends—not just Americans, even Indians settled in the U.S.
As I reflected on my loss of some of my Christian friends living in America, I sadly noted the great divide that has occurred among Evangelical Christians. I know that Evangelicalism is not White Christianity, but somehow I get the impression that the agenda of White Evangelical Christianity is being thrust on Evangelicals around the world. It would seem that if one is to be accepted as a born again Christian, then one is required to approve of the world's only born again Christian statesman. If you don't approve of Bush, you're not okay.
Most American Christians have put their faith in Bush imagining that he will ensure their safety. If anything, he has made the world more unsafe for Americans and even for those who side with Americans.
Will Christians in the U.S. hear the prophetic challenge from their global sisters and brothers? Or, like the friends Pastor Chandy has lost, will they value their political allegiances above their allegiance to Christ, and to his body in the worldwide church?
Though I own several Bibles with the words of Christ in red, I've always found the concept a bit iffy. After all, we evangelicals believe in the plenary, or full, inspiration of Scripture, don't we? Setting off Jesus' sayings this way seems to imply that they are more holy than what is printed in ordinary black ink. ...[I]f all Scripture is God-breathed, then in principle Jesus' inscripturated statements are no more God's word to us than are those from Peter, Paul, and Mary - or Ezekiel.
While we, like you, have a very high view of the inspiration of Scripture and believe the Bible was divinely inspired, you are correct in accusing Red Letter Christians of giving the words of Jesus priority over all other passages of Scripture. What is more, we believe that you really cannot rightly interpret the rest of the Bible without first understanding who Jesus is, what he did, and what he said.
Likewise, we believe the morality in the red letters of Jesus transcends that found in the black letters set down in the Pentateuch, and I'm surprised you don't agree. After all, Stan, didn't Jesus himself make this same point in the Sermon on the Mount, when he said his teachings about marriage and divorce were to replace what Moses taught? Don't you think his red-letter words about loving our enemies and doing good to those who hurt us represent a higher morality than the "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" kind of justice that we find in the Hebrew Testament? Is it really so hard to accept that, as God incarnate, Jesus set forth the highest law in the Bible, and therefore that law is more important than the Kosher dietary regulations we find in Leviticus and Deuteronomy?
You got us RLCs right again when you suggested we were anti-war, pro-environment, and deeply committed to ending poverty primarily because we believe Jesus is anti-war, pro-environment, and deeply committed to ending poverty. The only mistake you made was to imply that thinking this way - or trying to influence our government according to these values - makes us the Religious Left:
Unfortunately, the platform of Red Letter Christians always seems to come out of the wash blue, just as some other "nonpartisan" Christian groups consistently align with the Republicans.
That you think asking questions such as, "Do the candidates' budget and tax policies reward the rich or show compassion for poor families?," or "Do the candidates' policies protect the creation or serve corporate interests that damage it?," is partisan saddens us. We believe these are the questions that every Christian should be asking, no matter which political party or candidate has the better answers at a given time in history.
I'm sorry you don't want to be one of us, Stan. In the struggle to convince our fellow believers to think, act, give, and vote according to the teachings of Jesus, we Red Letter Christians could really use a bright, articulate guy like you.
Before it began, many evangelicals were strong supporters of a war with Iraq. As the death and destruction have continued, some are rethinking that view and coming to oppose the war. David Gushee, professor at Mercer University, has an important piece – Our Teachable Moment - on Christianity Today online. Gushee writes:
Such deep public distress about the war makes this a teachable moment for all of us, as Christians and as Americans. It's not enough to find a way out of this war honorably and soon. We have an opportunity to learn some deeper lessons so that we won't repeat our mistakes.
For evangelicals, one of the groups that strongly supported the war initially, one lesson is clear: We must become more discerning when our nation's leaders advocate a military solution. We have biblical resources for doing so, if we will draw upon them.
He concludes:
For me, the next time I am asked to support a war, my default setting will be no rather than yes. As a follower of Christ, I will have to be persuaded that the particular confluence of circumstances is so grave as to require a military solution. Before Christians sign off on another war, we must do our best to figure out whether the government has done everything possible to make peace.
I couldn't sleep after watching last month's Republican presidential forum on August 5. I was especially disturbed by the intersection of two statements made by Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo. Perhaps because he is not in the top tier of Republican candidates, it was easy to consider his statements marginal and negligible, but I believe – completely apart from his presidential aspirations – that his statements should get us thinking, especially those of us who are, like Rep. Tancredo, known as evangelical Christians.
The representative said that as president he will tell Muslim extremists that if they attack the United States with nuclear weapons, he will respond by bombing Medina and Mecca.
Although the State Department has called his statement "reprehensible" and "crazy," a few days later Tancredo offered what seemed to be further justification for his statement. He explained, according to Iowapolitics.com, that a promise to destroy Muslim holy sites "is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack."
Although none of the other candidates in the forum seemed to agree with Tancredo, they all seemed eager to prove themselves most ready to keep nuclear weapons "on the table" and to present themselves as "strong on national defense," which now may turn out to mean "committed to pre-emptive war theory over just war theory."
Tancredo's threat was all the more disturbing to me in light of something he said later in the same forum when asked about his most significant mistake. He replied, "… it took me probably 30 years before I realized that Jesus Christ is my personal Savior."
Of course, this confluence of aggressive rhetoric with professions of evangelical faith is not unique to Tancredo. For example, a recent editorial by a popular and award-winning religious broadcasting personality had a similar theo-combative tone. Christiane Amanpour's recent "God's Warriors" series on CNN brought a number of other similar voices to our attention.
Democratic candidates are certainly not immune to this impulse to flex their combat credentials, evidenced by recent sparring between leading candidates. We can hope, in the midst of a heated campaign season, that responsible theologians and religious leaders will acknowledge the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and engage in a needed public conversation about faith, politics, and war. This life-and-death conversation can't be left to politicians and media pundits alone. A recent New York Times article by Mark Lilla raises some key issues to be addressed in this needed dialogue.
A few evangelical voices have spoken out strongly against this ongoing inflation in aggressive rhetoric, but in my mind, remarkably few. Some, no doubt, do not want to dignify extreme statements with a reply. A surprising number, though – readily searchable in the blogosphere – are actually saying "amen."
As I mull all this over in the middle of the night – running the bases from angst to depression to prayer and hope - I can't help but think of the oft-heard complaint regarding moderate Muslims: Why don't they stand up and speak out more vociferously against the violent rhetoric of Muslim extremists? If their religion truly is peaceful, why don't they speak up for peace more passionately? This may now become a "plank and splinter" issue (Matthew 7:3-5) for evangelical Christians – not to mention Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestants, and others -- raising questions like these:
At what point does the rhetoric of fellow evangelicals (or Roman Catholics, etc.) become extreme enough to elicit from evangelical leaders the kind of loud and public response we wish moderate Muslims had been giving regarding Muslim extremists? Which leaders are speaking out, and which aren't?
Does Rep. Tancredo's recent statement qualify as excessive? Why or why not? If not, what would push it over the line?
How can evangelicals in particular and Christians in general who don't agree with this kind of rhetoric respond constructively - and in ways that will be heard as widely as the original statements?
How do thoughtful Christian theologians respond to this kind of rhetoric? On what basis do they justify or reject this kind of rhetoric and the biblical interpretation used to defend it? Where and how can concerned seminary professors and other scholars speak up and be heard?
What will be the predictable effects of this kind of rhetoric on the public perception of "evangelical" and "Christian" – among younger Christians in America? Among non-Christians? Among Muslims here and around the world?
What forms of deterrence can be explored that are more in line with the life and teachings of Jesus? In other words, if we reject both Rep. Tancredo's approach and the opposite approach of passivity, what could a creative, nonviolent, responsible third way look like?
How can we learn from leaders like Dr. King and Desmond Tutu to stir people to be as passionate about active peace-making as a solution to war as others are about war-making as a solution to war?
If "holy war" rhetoric is indeed escalating in a vicious cycle among Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others, what will be the predictable outcome? How can concerned religious leaders work for a new kind of dialogue and in so doing help chart a more peaceable course for their faith communities?
How can American evangelicals, and Christians in general, escape our echo chamber and begin to listen to the wise voices and concerns of their brothers and sisters around the globe – as Ryan Rodrick Beiler's recent posting invited us to do?
These questions are worth raising, because in the election year ahead, I expect there will be a lot more of this kind of "God's warriors" rhetoric to respond to. Maybe Rep. Tancredo's proposal can serve the constructive purpose of provoking some mature and constructive reflection – some evangelical ijtihad, to borrow a theme from Irshad Manji.
I do not in any way want to vilify Rep. Tancredo. The fact is, he cares about something worth caring about: how to stop the vicious cycle of terrorism that seems to be escalating each day. Even if his proposal is as dangerous and misguided as I believe it is, the candidate is to be commended for seeking a solution to this very real danger. I hope that more and more of us will become motivated – and resourced by our faith – not simply to complain about violent solutions to the problem of violence, but instead to make better proposals, because this one, I believe, is a recipe for disaster. To continue living by the sword, according to a reputable authority, is not a sustainable long-term strategy for living at all.
I first heard about the letter of the evangelical leaders through an e-mail from Professor Ron Sider, who used to teach at Messiah College, where I graduated. It was a gift from heaven after so many bad statements by evangelicals justifying killings, occupation, and the pillage of our land using so-called biblical interpretations. I tried to get the letter to as many media outlets as I know, especially some of the major newspapers and satellite TV stations like al Jazzera and Al Arrabiyeh. I wanted people in our part of the world to know that there are other Christian evangelicals from America who think and speak differently than the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Fallwells and other Christian Zionists.
The same day, my family and I were invited to the home of the pastor of the local Christian Alliance Church in Amman. Reverend Yousef Hashweh and his wife are long-time friends of my parents and my wife's family. My father-in-law was an Alliance pastor in Jerusalem between 1957 and 1975. They had invited us for a good-bye dinner as we were about to travel to the U.S. I have been asked to teach a course at Princeton University on the topic of new media in the Arab world.
When I told them about the letter and that one of the signatories was the president of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, they rushed to their computer and made a print out of the letter. They were checking to be sure that Gary M. Benedict, president of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, had in fact signed a letter calling for a Palestinian state.
We spent the evening trading stories of the many false predictions (spoken as if they were true prophecies) made by Christian evangelicals about our part over the years. I told them my favorite story of seeing Pat Robertson in 1982 opening his Bible while speaking on the 700 Club, stating that the invasion of Israel to Lebanon was specifically detailed in the Old Testament and that PLO leader Yasser Arafat was none other than the anti-Christ. And then 12 years later the same Pat Robertson was taking a photo opportunity with none other than the former anti-Christ, Yasser Arafat, at his Gaza residency as Robertson was giving a donation of milk for Palestinian children.
The letter of the 34 evangelical leaders certainly was a pleasant surprise to many of us Christians in the Middle East who were beginning to doubt our own understanding of our faith in light of so many televangelists throwing themselves blindly behind the Israeli military. Hopefully these voices of sanity will continue and we will hear the true voice of an evangelical community who believes in justice and human rights. Liberty and freedom apply both to the spiritual as well as to the worldly needs of humankind. The sooner the evangelicals of the world embrace that, the sooner this will be a better world for all of us.
Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and the director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University and the founder of the Arab world's first internet radio station, ammannet. His e-mail is info@daoudkuttab.com.
I've gotta admit, it hasn't been easy being a Christian Arab-American, much less in the evangelical church. How many times can you explain that Jesus wasn't baptized in the Rio Grande, that there are tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinian Christians still living in the Holy Land, and that loving Jewish people and "blessing Israel" (as is oft cited from scripture) doesn't mean giving the modern (and mind you, secular) nation-state of Israel a carte blanche on foreign policy or grant it some sort of biblical immunity from criticism? For too long, such criticism has been deemed by my fellow American evangelical brothers and sisters as not only unbiblical but sometimes even -- yes, anti-semitic. (Notwithstanding the fact that Arabs are also Semites), the idea that Palestinians had any right to any part of the Holy Land has long been considered anathema by too many of my American kinfolk.
So you can only imagine how tickled I was to read about a letter to President Bush signed by evangelical leaders across America, encouraging a two-state solution. Read the letter published by The New York Times here.
We also write to correct a serious misperception among some people including some U.S. policymakers that all American evangelicals are opposed to a two-state solution and creation of a new Palestinian state that includes the vast majority of the West Bank. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What I appreciated even more about this letter was some of the theology they included to counter the notion that "blessing Israel" somehow means "letting Israel do anything Israel wants to.":
As evangelical Christians, we embrace the biblical promise to Abraham: 'I will bless those who bless you.' (Genesis 12:3). And precisely as evangelical Christians committed to the full teaching of the Scriptures, we know that blessing and loving people (including Jews and the present State of Israel) does not mean withholding criticism when it is warranted. Genuine love and genuine blessing means acting in ways that promote the genuine and long-term well being of our neighbors.
Are my American evangelical brethren coming around? Hallelujah.
I hope through our efforts for peace, God will bless Israelis, Palestinians, and everyone else. Let's just be careful not to define "bless" too narrowly.
Deanna Murshed is director of integrated marketing for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.
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Andrew Wilkes is a policy and organizing intern at Sojourners. He is currently pursuing a Masters of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. He offers reflections at Foursquare, a blog that encourages abstinence as a spiritual discipline with social consequences.
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Marcia Ford is the author of 
Brian McLaren also blogs at 
Rich Nathan is the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Columbus, Ohio, which is the co-sponsor with Sojourners of next week's Justice Revival. 
In church one day, my pastor asked us to raise our hands if we believed in what the Bible said. The right answer seemed pretty obvious, and the whole congregation and I raised our hands. Then he asked us to raise our hand if we had read the Bible in its entirety. Touché, Pastor Sean. Touché. 
Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners. For more information on the book, 
Let me give you an illustration of the difference between the narrow focus of contemporary American evangelicalism and the big focus of the Bible. 
Deanna Murshed is director of integrated marketing for Sojourners
The Nov. 27 Annapolis meeting on Israel/Palestine has launched us into a momentous one-year process to seek a permanent peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors. What is at stake is whether after more than 50 years of ghastly conflict and widespread bloodshed, genuine peace can come to one of the most dangerous areas and most divisive problems in our world. 
Ron Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action, a professor and director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a member of the 
In what may be the defining moment of his campaign, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a Mormon, addressed the issue of faith and its bearing on his pursuit of the presidency. Pundits inevitably compared Romney's speech in College Station, Texas, with the speech that John F. Kennedy gave just down the road at the Rice Hotel, Houston, on September 12, 1960.
Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. His most recent book, 
At its board meeting last month, the National Association of Evangelicals formally named Leith Anderson as its president. Anderson is senior pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and has been serving as interim president of the NAE for the past year.
I have had some respectful 
On Friday, Oct. 26, I was part of a small delegation of evangelical leaders who met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. We were there to follow up the letter we sent to President Bush in late July to encourage more vigorous U.S. efforts to promote a fair, two-state solution for Israel/Palestine. 
The name 
Last evening I attended a reception and dinner in Washington for evangelical Christian leaders, which is not an unusual event here. But the topic and, especially, the main speaker would seem highly unusual to many. The event, called "A Global Leaders Forum," was hosted by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Micah Challenge, a global advocacy campaign focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are aimed at cutting extreme global poverty in half by 2015. The topics that brought 250 evangelical leaders together from around the U.S. and world were indeed global poverty and the urgent issue of climate change. Both issues are now firmly on the agenda of the evangelical mainstream, as last night's impressive list of leaders demonstrated. 
As the Religious Right has diminished in influence, many are searching for a new political agenda that doesn’t fit the standard right/left battles of American politics and is more consistent with their deeply held values. That new agenda would be 
In two recent posts, 
In response to Stan Guthrie's article in the October 2007 Christianity Today, 
I couldn't sleep after watching last month's Republican presidential forum on August 5. I was especially disturbed by the intersection of two statements made by Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo. Perhaps because he is not in the top tier of Republican candidates, it was easy to consider his statements marginal and negligible, but I believe – completely apart from his presidential aspirations – that his statements should get us thinking, especially those of us who are, like Rep. Tancredo, known as evangelical Christians. 
I first heard about the 
Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and the director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University and the founder of the Arab world's first internet radio station, ammannet. His e-mail is 
