1 of 3
Evangelicals today probably have more political influence in the United States than at any time in this century. But we are largely squandering this historic opportunity. Why? Because today's evangelical political voices are often confused, contradictory, and superficial. Evangelicals lack anything remotely similar to Catholicism's papal encyclicals and episcopal pronouncements on social and political issues, which have provided Roman Catholics with an integrated framework for approaching each concrete political decision. Evangelicals have jumped into the political fray without doing our homework. That our confused, superficial activity has had little lasting impact should not surprise us.
Take the issue of "school prayer." Evangelicals are all over the waterfront on this issue. Popular evangelical preachers blast the Supreme Court for "outlawing prayer in the schools," simplistically blaming this legal decision for America's moral decline. Congressman Ernest J. Istook (R-Okla.) wants a constitutional amendment to protect voluntary school prayer. Others want constitutional, or at least legislative, action to guarantee equal benefits to adherents of all religious groups. (One devout evangelical congressional aide was attacked by her home congregation as an apostate because she and her evangelical boss in Congress preferred the latter proposal to the Istook amendment.) Still other evangelicals think all of the above proposals would violate the First Amendment and destroy the boundary between church and state.
It is hardly surprising that this level of naivete and confusion leads nowhere. In fact, as Ralph Reed points out, it easily results in evangelicals being used. In Active Faith, Reed reports on the way Ronald Reagan manipulated the issue of school prayer to mobilize the evangelical vote in 1984. As Reagan's advisers prepared for the 1984 campaign, they realized they had "tossed only a few morsels to the Moral Majority." So they decided to stage a fake drive to pass a constitutional amendment on school prayer. First, they asked a conservative senator to do a head count. When he reported insufficient votes to pass the bill, the Reagan staffer replied, "Good, we just wanted to make sure that it could not pass before we began the battle." The whole House then rallied the leaders of the Religious Right and promised to twist arms to pass the bill on the prayer amendment. But it was all a farce. Evangelicals did not understand either the politics or the substance of the issue.
Or consider evangelical pronouncements on the role of government. Sometimes, when attacking government programs we dislike, evangelicals adopt libertarian arguments that would preclude almost all government activity to promote economic justice ("Helping the poor is a task for individuals and churches, not the government"). Then when the issues change to abortion, euthanasia, and pornography, the same people loudly demand vigorous government action.
The absence of a consistent ethic of life leads to absurdly selective moral judgments. Some evangelicals make the sanctity of human life (up to birth and just before death) the overriding issue and neglect the way poverty and smoking destroy millions. Other evangelicals, eager to point out that racism, poverty, and environmental decay all kill, seem strangely indifferent to the reality of abortion.
Our superficiality and confusion result in part from the fact that we have seldom taken the time to work out carefully the specific policy implications of biblical faith. Too often our agenda is shaped more by secular ideologies or polling data and focus groups than by divine revelation. Evangelicals urgently need a political philosophy. It would not solve all our political problems. But it would help.
share this page
RSS Feed
