Thanks for the reminder.

I don’t think we can do much to get the converted to care. I think that is something God has to do.
We can educate, we can help people look past their own horizon, we can love and pray, but not much else.
It was interesting posting this because as a Canadian I am very much an outsider and have no emotional investment in this survey.
I posted this in Wales too at connexions.
Thought I’d toss it out and see what I could hear. Blog on!

The definition of evangelical used in the survey is defined this way in The Religion and Ethics Magazine.

By evangelical the survey means EITHER respondents who indicated that they are Protestant or another Christian religious preference other than Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Mormon and who indicated they would say they are a fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic or Pentecostal Protestant OR respondents who indicated that they are Protestant or another Christian religious preference other than Roman Catholic, Orthodox or Mormon who do not consider themselves liberal or mainline and call themselves a born-again Christian. This is not the only definition of evangelical, of course, but it does define the core of the evangelical community.

…An overwhelming majority of all evangelicals (84%) believe that personal faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, compared with 38% of Catholics and 56% of non-evangelical Protestants. Just half of white evangelicals, however, believe that only born-again Christians go to heaven, and even fewer black evangelicals (42%) say they believe only born-again Christians will go to heaven.

1) There is a general political feeling common to most conservative evangelicals (though not all of us) that runs with the “Christian Right” and experiences a of ridicule from the more-liberal media. American vangelicals have a tendancy to tie faith and politics together to such a degree that to offend the one is to offend the other.

2) Reading the words of Christ that his sheep will suffer and be at odds with the world, evangelicals want to view themselves at odds with the world even when they are not. It becomes a mark of distiction - hence, never having tasted real persecution, you have people describing light mockery as “persecution in the workplace.”

I always get a chuckle out of these situations as Christianity unfettered is not mainstream, nor was it ever intended to be mainstreamed. When believers fight to make the ideas of Christianity palatable to the world around them, they are missing the point that unbelievers can only view a proper Christianity as foolish (so sayeth the Apostle).

As far as the lack of international focus in evangelicals, i think this is less a function of their faith than it is of the culture in which they were raised. Americans, generally, are very focused on their own communities and are loathe to cast their eye elsewhere if all is not running well in the local sense. While some view this as selfish, I tend to see it more as a brand of pragmatism (e.g., how can the minister properly minister to his congregation unless his own home is in order). Most evangelical Americans don’t see an international perspective as integral to their faith or lives simply because they look down their street and see kids on crack and co-workers cheating on their wives. It is only when they perceive a large-scale threat to their lives from abroad that the turn their attention outward (this is why most Americans still don’t know what US involvement in Somalia or Bosnia was all about).

Umm..well…yes. Exactly.

There’s nothing more bizarre than a large, wealthy, powerful, congress-and-white-house-controlling segment of the population stridently insisting that they are the embattled minority. It would be funny, if it weren’t so sad…and scary…

The article put the figure at 23% of the population, not 23 million. Since the US population is about 280 million, that would mean that there is 64 million of them.

I am realizing, I think, that there is a lot of missions work to be done right here. How do you get the converted to care?