My Take: Are evangelicals dangerous?

Are evangelicals dangerous? Well, certainly not in the sense that more secular voices warn. The vast majority of evangelicals are not attempting to create a theocracy, or to oppose democracy.

To the contrary, evangelicals are dangerous to the secularist vision of this nation and its future precisely because we are committed to participatory democracy.

As Christians committed to the Bible, evangelicals have learned to advocate on behalf of the unborn, believing that every single human being, at every stage of development, is made in God’s image.

Evangelicals worry about the fate of marriage and the family, believing that the pattern for human relatedness set out in Scripture will lead to the greatest human flourishing.

We are deeply concerned about a host of moral and cultural issues, from how to address poverty to how to be good stewards of the earth, and on some of these there is a fairly high degree of disagreement even among us.

Above all, evangelicals are those who believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and are most concerned about telling others about Jesus. 

Most of America’s evangelical Christians are busy raising their children, working to support their families and investing energy in their local churches.   Read it all HERE

Mormonism, Democracy, and the Urgent Need for Evangelical Thinking

Predictably, Mormonism is in the news again. The presence of two members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints among contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination ensured that it was only a matter of time before Evangelicals, along with other Americans, began to talk openly about what this means for the nation, the church, and the stewardship of political responsibility in the voting booth. 

There are numerous ways to frame these questions wrongly. Our responsibility as evangelical Christians is to think seriously and biblically about these issues. The first temptation is to reduce all of these issues to one question. We must address the question of Mormonism as a worldview and judge it by the Bible and historic Christian doctrine. But this does not automatically determine the second question — asking how Mormon identity should inform our political decisions. Nevertheless, for evangelical Christians, our concern must start with theology. Is Mormonism just a distinctive denomination of Christianity?   Keep Reading>>>

From Billy Graham To Sarah Palin

Near the close of the 1976 U.S. Presidential campaign, Newsweek magazine famously declared 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical.” In subsequent years, Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” Pat Robertson’s “Christian Coalition,” and James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” assumed leading roles on the stage of American political life. Each strongly identified with the Republican party and conservative public policy.

In the last decade, however, a new set of actors has appeared on this stage. Leaders such as Rick Warren, Jim Wallis, and Ron Sider – all bearing evangelical credentials – have bristled against evangelicalism’s longstanding identification with the Republican party. Promoting left-of-center public policies, these spokesmen do not appear to be speaking only for themselves. Polls suggest that a growing number of younger self-identified evangelicals have wearied of the policies and party affiliation of their elders. Forty years ago, Wallis and Sider were sideline figures in evangelicalism. Today, they are closer to the mainstream of evangelical sentiment than they have ever been.

What happened? In From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism, Hart offers an account of and an explanation for this recent turn of events. He charts a deep and longstanding current within American evangelicalism – one that has paradoxically embraced both right-leaning and left-leaning public policies. He also argues that the tradition of American political conservatism offers evangelicals a constructive model for civil engagement – if they are willing to listen and learn.

 

Billy Graham Image

Sarah Palin Image