In the past several years, American evangelicals - and I am one of them - have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?
Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war.
In that period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed President George W. Bush’s war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.
According to Charles Marsh, 87% of white evangelicals supported George Bush in April 2003. He looks at some sermons three years later as 68% of white evangelicals continue their support for the war. He recently spoke with John Stott who helped convene The 1974 Lausanne Covenent where:
“…the signatories affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that “the church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology.”
Marsh ends with:
What will it take for American evangelicals to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world.
via: The Revealer
Published 2 years, 10 months ago
Search
Subscribe 
You are currently browsing the Bene Diction Blogs On weblog archives.
Related Entries
- Untangling communication
- God and Country - the state of Evangelical isolation in the US
- A. baumannii coming home with wounded soldiers
- Soldiers
- Pick a little, talk a little, blog a lot, go do!
- Adrian Warnock
- Brits drop 'war on terror'
- The speck in the eye
- Journal of Ruth rejected by Christian Carnival
- Who let the dogs out?
For blog design, Wordpress or MovableType coding or blog consulting, see cre8d design.
The tendency of some Republicans to associate aspects of their political agenda with the belief system derived from evangelical Christianity is a mistake.
A number of problems emerge when tenets and values derived from religion make their way into the public domain.
American society first of all is only nominally Christian. Moreover it includes citizens of many different faiths. When you look at American popular culture with its emphasis of narcissistic self indulgence, it becomes clear that a type of hedonistic neo-paganism is alive and well, rather than anything approximating to the spirit of Jesus.
America is complex and the society has been painstakingly created on a set of principles that address issues of rights and freedoms. In other words the thinking that went into the constitution derived from humanitarian concerns, issues of justice etc and bringing the bible and Jesus into this is totally inappropriate - just as it would be inappropriate to overule constitutional provisions by an appeal to the dictates of Sharia law or any other law derived from a holy book.
Evnagelical Christians are indeed making a mistake when they identify their values with the Bush administration. I should make clear that I’m not saying this as a way of putting down the Bush administration, but rather to point out the fallacy in the thinking of evangelicals.
George Bush heads a power that has been dubbed “Great Satan” by some in the Islamic world. It is a capitalist power; a power that upholds the freedom of the individual and the power of free enterprise. I like all that stuff. But to try and associate the drives of a cutting edge capitalist society with the gospel of Jesus Christ is a big error.
George Bush makes the same mistake in this regard that the evangelicals. Instead of seeing himself as the President of a “wordly” power - he erroneously views America as “Christian” and his mission abroad i.e. Iraq as “Christian” also, as his many references to prayer and God’s desire that people should be free etc, imply.
Jesus of Nazareth never touched political movements. He deliberately kept them at arms length. The saying “render onto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” comes to mind. There is a clear demarcation in the mind of jesus between God on the one hand - and Caesar on the other.
The effort of Bush and the evangelicals to marry the two has created a false paradigm. It can’t work because it has no basis in reality.
Jesus mission was to the individual. His was a gospel of love and self-renunciation. His gospel explicitly casts off the “things of the world”. According to Jesus rich men won’t inherit the kingdom of God. What would he say about a capitalist system geared toward making people rish, richer and the richest around.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because I’m not promoting Jesus’ world view. I am however saying that the teachings of Jesus are totally incompatible with the energies, ambitions and strategies of American capitalism. Those who try to marry the two are constructing a strange fiction. Doubtless this fiction suits their ends vis-a-vis their political goals, but I doubt if Jesus would be too thrilled about it. Remember he was the guy who drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip.
So I think it’s a false position and American Republicans, in my opinion, are making a mistake by marrying their political agenda too closely with that of evangelical Christianity.