I admit it.
I enjoy bashing the Religious Right as much as the next guy.
These jokers have left people like me in various states of depression for decades, though they’re good for a lot of laughs too. As someone who likes satire, I’ll miss them if they ever move off the national stage the way cartoonists are gonna miss Bush when he finally limps back to Texas.
But after the past election, when white evangelicals again voted largely in a knee jerk partisan fashion even in the face of a sleazy, ineffective congress and a baldly incompetent administration, it’s hard to believe
the monologue of the Religious Right won’t go on indefinitely within the evangelical church.
Yet there are some big reasons for hope:
• The National Association for Evangelicals issued a document entitled “For the Health of the Nation” a couple of years back. Yes, it’s just a position paper and yes, it can take years for the consensus of pastoral leaders to trickle down to your average Joe Faith and his behavior in the voting booth.
But the document clearly calls for an emphasis not only on the sanctity of human life and family and marriage, but also on social justice and compassion for the poor, peacemaking, human rights, and "creation care" (the Christian euphemism for
"crazy ass green").
In other words, Christians can feel good about chucking partisanship and moving toward a more authentic and
Christian anarchical social teaching that doesn’t see abortion and homosexuality as the only game in town. The document makes room for Christians to take up a position in the ‘radical religious middle’ that no current political party or social movement represents.
• Glen Stanton—a big fish at Focus on the Family—recently wrote in
Christianity Today that evangelicals have got to break out of a mean spirited, single issue agenda and embrace a ‘pro-human movement.’ The gospel according to Glen? Not only a focus on the sanctity of human life and the family, but working against “human death, pain and alienation caused by genocide, war, global poverty, substance abuse, fatherlessness, AIDS and cancer, as well as human trafficking, child abandonment, commercialization, and radical individualism.”
Geez, the guy sounds like Bono. Or Jim Wallis. And all of it emanating from Colorado Springs.
Hell has now officially frozen over :^)•
The New York Times recently called evangelicals ‘the new internationalists’ because of the vigorous work on the part of some evangelicals on issues like human rights, religious freedom, Sudan and now Darfur.
• A new organization called Evangelicals for Human Rights has emerged, and some big wig evangelicals have come out clearly against the Bush administration’s egregious use of “vigorous interrogation methods" (read
torture).
• If I read the direction of the winds correctly, the most influential evangelical leaders among younger evangelicals right now are folks like Rick Warren and Brian McClaren who both clearly reject the methods and the agenda of the Religious Right and favor a much more centrist and anarchical social approach.
• The social teachings of the Catholic Church have always been in the radical religious middle, and some of us Protestant yahoos moved that direction decades ago.
What if the thoughtful Catholics and the growing number of Protestant yahoos got together? Given the numbers of both groups, it could change both political parties dramatically and might even spawn whole new approaches beyond the two party system. Radical religious middle indeed. Evangelicals might feel more free to join both parties in large numbers to help reform them and draw them toward more honest social and foreign policy goals.
Could be exciting. Might even make my 25 years in
the wilderness waiting for the monologue to end feel worthwhile :^)