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Political candidates' fortunes aside, the forum likely served as a boon to both Faith in Public Life (FPL) and Messiah College. The former is a relatively new organization founded after the 2004 election that demonstrated that it can attract not just political candidates, but also religious leaders from a broad spectrum (in fact, evangelicals dominated the FPL-picked questions from the floor). It's tempting to call it a rival to Sojourners, but the two groups closely cooperate and have different missions. In its earlier days FPL was slightly to the left of Sojourners. More recently, however, it seems to have moved away from an emphasis on countering the Religious Right, and has focused more on building bridges across religious and ideological boundaries.

The forum served to spotlight Messiah College, which constitutes nearly the entire town of Grantham, Pennsylvania. The school of 2,800 students has been the envy of many colleges — not just Christian ones — for its ability to attract big-name music acts to campus. The National plays here in a few weeks, and seniors remember fondly seeing Bob Dylan play here when they were freshmen. Now, hosting the two Democratic candidates just days before Pennsylvania's Democratic presidential primary, the students are abuzz about the campus's "cultural engagement." There's an irony here, since the school was founded by the Anabaptist Brethren in Christ Church in 1909. It now describes itself as "committed to an embracing evangelical spirit rooted in the Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan traditions of the Christian Church."

CNN has a transcript of the event.

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April (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52