Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Peter Steinfels, Religious Right May Be Fading, but Not the ‘Culture Wars’ – New York Times, February 16, 2008

On every side, one can read obituaries for the religious right.

Jim Wallis’s new book, “The Great Awakening,” carries the subtitle, “Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” E. J. Dionne Jr.’s book, “Souled Out,” is subtitled “Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.” The subtitle of David P. Gushee’s new book, “The Future of Faith in American Politics,” poses “The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center” against that of the religious right.

Sometimes stated outright and sometimes between the lines is the hope that the decline of the religious right will ease what Americans have come to know as the culture wars.

There is no question that many evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics have grown disenchanted with both the political agenda and what they see as the strident style of the organized religious right. Some have been convinced, by their own Scriptures and by new leaders, that poverty, human rights, genocide, sex trafficking and global warming must be no less matters of Christian concern than abortion, homosexuality and embryonic stem-cell research. Even more have reacted against their faith being enlisted in partisan politics.

Raised arm of evangelical woman praying, by Christopher Morris/VII

Evangelical Movement, Presidential Election of 2008, New York Times, October 28, 2007

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State — the public face of the conservative Christian political movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel’s pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, “Answering the Call.” Major national conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its North American Mission Board.

Dana Milbank – Guess Who Came to the Evangelicals’ Dinner – washingtonpost.com, October 12, 2007

In the wildly popular “Left Behind” series of evangelical Christian novels, the Antichrist takes the form of the secretary general of the United Nations, sets up an abortion-promoting world government and becomes the Global Community Supreme Potentate.Last night, the National Association of Evangelicals met for dinner at the Sheraton in Crystal City. The keynote speaker? Why, the Antichrist himself.

Actually, the NAE, the umbrella group for the nation’s evangelical denominations, brought in the real U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, not his fictional satanic equivalent, Nicolae Carpathia of Romania. But for the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE official who invited Ban, it was just about as daring. Evangelical Christians regard the United Nations’ blue helmets with about as much enthusiasm as Satan’s red horns.

E. J. Dionne Jr. – A Culture War Treaty – washingtonpost.com, October 9, 2007

You know the religious right is in trouble when some of its leaders threaten to bolt the Republican Party if it nominates a candidate who supports abortion rights.

But the well-publicized warning directed against Rudy Giuliani this month is decidedly not the most important sign that religious conservatives are facing the disintegration of their movement.

What matters more is that a new generation of evangelical leaders, tired of the rancid partisanship, is breaking away from the culture wars. The reach of this new evangelical politics will be tested with the release tomorrow of a statement under the very biblical title “Come Let Us Reason Together.” The question for the future is how many in the evangelical ranks will embrace this call.

Organized by Third Way, a group that is close to many leading moderate Democrats, the statement calls for “first steps toward bridging the cultural divide between progressives and evangelicals.”

Marsh, Evangelicals against the Iraq war, The Boston Globe, July 8, 2007