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Inconsistency marks our major political options. As a consequence, Christians seeking a biblically balanced political agenda find it difficult to find a political home. President Clinton champions the "right" to abortion and then leads the campaign against smoking out of respect for the lives of the 400,000 people who die annually from cigarette-caused cancer. Sen. Jesse Helms leads the pro-life forces against abortion and then lobbies for tobacco subsidies.

Many of the members of Congress who receive a 100 percent score (and thus the Friends of the Family Award) on the Christian Coalition's Congressional Scorecard also receive large donations from the tobacco and liquor pacs. One also has to wonder why the Christian Coalition's Congressional Scorecard considers eliminating environmental and safety regulations as "pro-family" votes. Surely God cares about the family and the poor, the unborn and creation.

So often the Christian Right has rightly championed the family and the sanctity of human life but neglected to work for equal opportunities for the poor, uncritically endorsed American nationalism, ignored concern for God's creation, and neglected the struggle against racism. Equally one-sided has been a Christian Left that rightly promoted justice, peace, and the integrity of creation but largely forgot about the importance of the family and sexual integrity, and failed to defend the most vulnerable of all--the unborn and the very old.

The result is that many evangelical Christians find it increasingly difficult to feel at home within the current political landscape. Evangelicals who seek to be good stewards of the environment find some of their strongest allies to be folks who think mandatory parental notification for teenagers contemplating an abortion is oppressive. Meanwhile, activists who seek the legal protection of the unborn find themselves keeping company with elements on the Right who think the United Nations is part of an international conspiracy designed to usher in a demonic New World Order.

This can all be sloughed off with the rationalization that "politics makes strange bedfellows." But there is a deeper problem. In this polarized environment, the voices of those are effectively muted whose Christian convictions lead them to support the legal protection of the unborn and who want to protect endangered species, who oppose legalizing homosexual marriages and favor restrictions on the tobacco industry.

This is not to say that the failure to protect endangered species or regulate the tobacco industry is morally equivalent to the current regime of abortion on demand. But it is unbiblical for pro-life Christians to overlook the sanctity of life of those who die unnecessarily because of tobacco, war, pollution, or starvation.

Evidence demonstrates that the current popular political options fail to represent a large segment of American Christians. Lyman A. Kellstedt at Wheaton College and Corwin A. Smidt at Calvin College have studied evangelical political attitudes more extensively than anyone else in the last ten years. They point out that although evangelicals now overwhelmingly vote Republican (78 percent in 1994), only 39 percent of all evangelicals feel "close or very close" to the Religious Right.

The secular media sometimes seem to suggest that evangelicals care only about the family, the unborn, and biblical sexual norms. But the Kellstedt/Smidt team discovered in a 1992 nationwide poll that a majority of evangelical voters favor tough environmental regulations (54.7 percent), comprehensive health insurance (54.9 percent), and vigorous efforts to ease hunger and poverty (53.8 percent).

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August 12 1996, Vol. 40, No. 9