The Christian Right Campaigns to Soften Its Image
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Members of a generation of evangelical leaders who've stepped onto the national political stage in the last decade have gone out of their way to define themselves as outside the Christian right, their socially conservative views notwithstanding. Think Rick Warren or Joel Hunter.
Such figures have two big beefs with the Christian right: its single-minded focus on hot-button issues—more or less ignoring social justice issues like fighting poverty or HIV/AIDS in Africa—and its belligerent approach to politics. (In the 1990s, Ralph Reed, then director of the Christian Coalition, said his enemies wouldn't be aware of his vast grass-roots army "until you're in a body bag.")
The Warrens and Hunters of the evangelical world broadened the evangelical political agenda and avoided slash-and-burn tactics and rhetoric.
For years, the Christian right criticized this new approach. "The poor and needy are important," James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, told me a few years back. "But . . . with the killing of 43 million babies, it's not in the same league—we're talking the unborn holocaust.
"You have to decide the things that matter most. . . . If that makes us sound extreme, I'll take it," he continued.
That was in 2005. These days, though, signs abound that the Christian right's old lions are coming around to Warren's and Hunter's way of doing things. Even if they continue to fixate on hot-button issues, the old guard is nonetheless shedding the bellicose rhetoric and a with-us-or-against-us view of politics.
Ralph Reed recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (following up on a story I broke here) that his new grass-roots group "has to be younger, hipper, less strident" than the Christian Coalition was. Jim Daly, the new president of Focus on the Family, has adopted a similarly winsome attitude, rejecting Dobson's warlike tone. Daly has repeatedly praised President Barack Obama. And just this week, he wrote a letter to an organ of the mainstream media—a bogeyman to the old Christian right—to compliment it on a recent story.
Will the Christian right's new, nicer approach work? It's unclear. Given the movement's sagging fortunes, however—Focus on the Family is struggling financially, and Reed has yet to prove his group's viability—it clearly feels that it must either follow Warren's and Hunter's lead or risk being eclipsed by them.
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Reader Comments
ABORTION
TO: TRUE AMERICAN OF NY
I would like to comment on what you wrote regarding abortion: "It's legal, it may not be yours or mine to agree with, but it's legal STUPID! AND it's a losing battle, especially today!!!!! If you want to win in 2010 and 2012 SHUT UP ON THIS ISSUE!!!!!"
As believers what is our focus to be? A political party? Or the Kingdom of God? I believe that the Messiah Himself stated "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousnes and all these things will be added to you." Matthew 6:33. If your party affiliation is more important to you than the Kingdom of God perhaps you need to "examine yourself to see if you are in the faith." God does not want any believer to "SHUT UP" about babies being murdered. Have you ever seen an aborted fetus? Legs, arms, trunks, a head with a spine attached floating in blood in a petri dish? All 10 fingers and all 10 toes. Think about what that felt like for that child. Now, do you still want everyone to "SHUT UP" about abortion? Just for votes??? And in case you weren't aware of it babies' body parts are sold to physicians in the United States. These innocents cannot speak for themselves. We must speak for them.
Christianity is about Jesus... not image!
Everyone wants to follow Jesus until they find out where He is going. He is going to a cross and he asks you to take up yours and follow Him.
What man deserves (and has earned by his own sin and offenses) is judgment. However, Christ supplies at His cost (His death for us) the free remedy of eternal life. "But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many…For the wages of sin is death, but the [free] gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 5:15; 6:23).
auradawnveirs of CA
Seems to me that you have been burned by religion. So tell us what happened to make you so bitter? As Stephen of WI points out you clearly either don't know history or your hatred of religion has gone so far as to cause you to side with the devil himself. come on, siding with USSR? So what happened to you? Did you make bad choices in life that are to painful to face up to if there is a God? Do you really favor chaos and anarchy because you would prefer others to feel the misery you feel everyday inside? Do you suppose that demolishing religion will change the guilt that is inside you? You may as well try and move Mt Everest as to destroy the believers faith. What is truly sad is that the refuge from the storm your soul seeks is that same refuge you seek to destroy.
Well, what ever you have done in your life God Bless you auradawnveirs and may you find peace...someday.
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