Evangelical political power overstated
There's an article on the Religion Blog of the Dallas News that reports on a new book by Christine Wicker.
The book is an examination of how the political power of the Evangelical movement in the US was overestimated, and is now falling back from even what it was at it's height.
There's an excerpt from her column for the Religion News Service:
"The truth is that the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest evangelical Protestant church, has seen its growth ebb. The convention recently announced its total membership declined by 40,000 in 2007. The number of baptisms has fallen for the seventh year out of eight. ...The truth is that evangelical Christianity has had almost no influence on the country at large. Fifty years ago, the moral stances taken by evangelicals that now seem so reactionary were then commonly accepted. Abortion was abhorred. Children were rarely born out of wedlock. Homosexual behavior was hidden and considered not only morally wrong but also an indication of mental illness. Unmarried couples rarely lived together.
All that has changed.
The truth is that after more than 20 years of political action and many electoral victories, the so-called religious right has achieved few of its objectives. Abortion is still legal. The idea that gays and lesbians are normal people, behaving normally and entitled to equal rights is widely accepted."
Read the full column here.
This is exactly what happens when our mainline traditions become entirely too intellectual in practice, and seem to be suspicious of the Sacred as something either Other or at least hair-raisingly transformational. Jesus wasn't Jesus just because he made people feel better about themselves when they were washing the dishes, rather he had a sense of the Numinous about him beyond just "share-meals" and "bread for the hungry". You don't have to be Christian or even religious to feed the hungry, though of course you must feed the hungry to be Christian, but then after all, isn't that why we have Deacons? Deacons aren't the only Order though, and our practice of Christianity must reflect that. We have vast resources of wisdom and tradition to enrich ourselves and the world around us. Let's re-learn how to utilize those again; remember, "Man does not live by bread alone..." Evangelicals are those who threw out the baby with the bathwater, and we need to remember that.
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May 9, 2008 1:40 PM