Evangelical Divide

This is a good article about the growing divide in evangelical Christians about what and how faith should play in politics. It has some quotes from Jim Wallis, the author of "God's Politics" which I recommend for everyone to read.

Moderate evangelicals preach their own politics

By Stevenson Swanson
Tribune national correspondent
Published February 14, 2005

NEW YORK -- When it comes to politics, evangelical Christians don't all sing from the same choir book.

Abortion, same-sex marriage and stem cell research may be the issues most commonly associated with evangelical voters, but moderate and liberal evangelicals are mounting an effort to make their voices heard on subjects not normally associated with their movement, including poverty, the war in Iraq and the environment.

White evangelical Protestants voted overwhelmingly for President Bush last year, but, illustrating the broader spectrum of thought within the group, 76 leaders of evangelical colleges, seminaries and ministries recently asked him to do something about what they called the nation's "unacceptably high" rates of hunger and poverty and the high numbers of Americans who lack health insurance.

"I think it's really important to break up the old stereotypes," said Rev. Jim Wallis, an evangelical whose new book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It," has drawn attention to evangelicals' political diversity. "There is a progressive religious option, and that is encouraging to people of faith who are tired of the control of this issue by the right."

Although precise definitions vary, the estimated 55 million evangelicals in America generally believe the Bible is infallible and that a transforming experience, or being "born again," is required for a person to be saved.

Wallis, for example, uses the Bible to back his contention that evangelicals should be more concerned about the poor. The Bible, he says, contains 3,000 verses that mention the poor.

"How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American?" he writes in "God's Politics."

Among other initiatives in the evangelical community, Call to Renewal, the anti-poverty advocacy group that Wallis heads, is working with other religious groups on the issue of achieving a "living wage" for low-income workers through increases in the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit.

For the sake of political influence, Wallis and others argue that the evangelical vote should not be taken for granted. That means, they say, that Republicans should not assume evangelicals automatically will vote for them and that Democrats should not give up attempts to make inroads among less-conservative religious voters.

Statistically, that's a hard argument to support. Evangelicals, who make up a quarter of the adult population, favored Bush by 78 percent to 22 percent for Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry, according to an analysis of election results by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That's up from Bush's 71 percent among evangelicals in 2000.
(Full Story)