The Evangelical Crackup

[Digitonomy]

Interesting article. Obviously the war is one of the biggest factors, but it’s interesting to get a little more background on other issues.

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 re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.

Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. 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.

Meanwhile, 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.
nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28Evangelicals-t.html"]Source

 

[Dale_M]

The article is lengthy… its a bit more than I could digest, so someone else will have to comment on it.

Here is the link again, in case anyone had trouble with the first one.
nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28Evangelicals-t.html?ex=1351224000&en=bbd7e5fec720454c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

[Digitonomy]

Thanks for reposting that link, I mistyped part of it but didn’t realize until your correction.

It is a pretty long article - 10 pages or so. Although I posted it mainly for how evangelicals are influencing the elections this year, another aspect I found interesting was the shift among some evangelicals in recent years toward a more Catholic approach. The last paragraph I posted capsulizes that, although we also saw such a shift years earlier when evangelicals began embracing abortion as a critical battle, while it had been mostly a Catholic issue prior to Roe v. Wade according to the article.

 

[tomarin]

the author of the article made a number of assertions that i had a hard time believing, namely:

-evangelicals are disenchanted with the war in iraq. i know that “evangelical” and “conservative” are not exactly the same thing, but the stereotypical evangelical in my head is a rock-ribbed conservative, and i don’t see these conservatives disavowing the war and adopting an anti-war or anti-interventionist philosophy. when the author interviewed several disenchanted republican evangelicals, i found myself wondering, “where are these antiwar conservatives on the CAF message boards?”

• the evil of legalized abortion has played itself out as a message for younger evangelicals. really? is that presumably because they don’t find it evil or because they have a broader interest in social justice issues? it would be a shame if they lost their outrage about abortion, since seen in its proper context it too is about social justice. you can’t be in favor of human rights if you allow unborn humans to be killed indiscriminately.
• i’m skipping this point in obervance of the ban on election-related topics.