Evangelical Paper Makes Political Shift

Evangelical Christians in America tend to have a very conservative image. There is a strong perception that they are more concerned with things like homosexuality and abortion than social justice and poverty. That, however, may be about to change. A draft paper that will probably be accepted emphasizes the importance of both types of issues.

Larry B. Stammer writes:

Steeped in biblical morality and evangelical scholarship, the framework could change how the estimated 30 million evangelicals in the United States are viewed by liberals and conservatives alike. It affirms a religiously based commitment to government protections for the poor, the sick and the disabled, including fair wages, health care, nutrition and education. It declares that Christians have a "sacred responsibility" to protect the environment.

But it also hews closely to a traditional evangelical emphasis on the importance of families, opposition to same-sex marriage, and "social evils" such as alcohol, drugs, abortion and the use of human embryos for stem-cell research. It reaffirms a commitment to religious freedom. In the midst of a presidential election year, war and terrorism, the framework says that Christians in their devotion to country "must be careful to avoid the excesses of nationalism." In domestic politics, evangelicals "must guard against over-identifying Christian social goals with a single political party, lest non-believers think that Christian faith is essentially political in nature."

This document has been three years in the making — but will it make any difference? It will provide people with something to point to in order to argue that evangelical Christianity is maturing, but the really test will be how evangelicals act. If we continue to see the dominant evangelical groups emphasizing things like abortion and homosexuality to the exclusion everything else, then there will be no reason to think that anything has changed. If we continue to see these evangelical groups hitching their wagons to the Republican Party, even to the point that others feel excluded and marginalized, then nothing will have changed. If we continue to see evangelicals acting as though True Christianity and True American Patriotism are one and the same, then the document will be effectively meaningless.

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• Fundamentalism
• Religious Right
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• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality