Christians Who Won’t Toe the Line
Monday, March 19, 2007 11:41 AM PDT
Evangelical Protestantism in the United States is going through a New Reformation that is disentangling a great religious movement from a partisan political machine.
This historic change will require liberals and conservatives alike to abandon their sometimes narrow views of who evangelicals are.
The reformers won an important victory this month when the board of the National Association of Evangelicals faced down right-wing partisans and reaffirmed its view that solving global warming was an important moral cause.
In so doing, it also expressed confidence in the Rev. Rich Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs.
Cizik, who combines opposition to abortion with a firm commitment to human rights, the poor and the environment, came under attack from a gang of ideologues who would freeze evangelicals on a political course set more than a quarter-century ago.
“This tussle over the issue of climate change is part of a bigger tussle over the definition of evangelicalism and who speaks for evangelicals,” Cizik said in an interview.
Calling on evangelicals to “return to being people who are known for our love and care for our fellow human beings and the Earth,” Cizik warned that “if you put the politics first and make it primary, I believe that is a tragic and fateful choice.”
Since 1980, white evangelical Christians have been seen primarily as a Republican voting bloc. They delivered more than three-quarters of their ballots to President Bush in the 2004 election.
That is no accident. In 1979, a group of conservative activists led by Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and Morton Blackwell, a Republican National Committee member from Virginia, went to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, urging him to organize what became the Moral Majority.
Their primary goal was not religious but political: to enlist evangelicals behind conservative Republican candidates.
Blackwell candidly called evangelicals “the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape.” The activists reaped a mighty load.
The Christian Coalition was equally political in its inspiration.
Emerging from Pat Robertson’s unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, it sought to advance his influence in the party.
The political maestros can’t abide any serious evangelical Christian daring to broaden the agenda beyond the limited set of issues (notably, opposition to abortion and gay rights) that keep the faithful voting Republican.
Cizik was a threat, so they attacked him in a March 1 letter to the NAE board.
It was signed by such conservative luminaries as Weyrich; James Dobson of Focus on the Family; Don Wildmon of the American Family Association; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; and Gary Bauer, who ran for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.
“Cizik and others,” they said, “are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.”
“We should be primarily concerned with what the Gospel says,” Cizik insists, “not whether you’re getting off some political train.”
Those are the words of a New Reformation.
Many evangelicals are boarding a new train. It runs along tracks defined by the broad demands of their faith, not by some party’s political agenda.
— The Washington Post Co.
