Interesting article on NPR yesterday about some demographic shifts going on in the evangelical / conservative Christian / “Religious Right” movement. While issues like abortion and homosexuality are still important, more evangelical congregations seem to be looking at other causes, including the environment. That differs them from old-school leaders like the late Jerry Falwell.
“It is Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus,” Falwell said in March to his 22,000-person-strong congregation at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va.
“I’m telling these guys they need to get off that kick,” Falwell said, “because the idea is to divert your energies from the message and the mission and the vision of the church, to something less.”
More environmentally-conscious evangelicals note, to the contrary, that the very first commands to humanity (Gen. 1:26-28, Gen. 2:15) involves stewardship over creation. Other “compassion issues” involve concerns about the war and dealing with poverty.
For years, groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council adopted a narrow strategy. They zeroed in on “below the belt issues” — abortion and more recently, homosexuality. Politically, it worked. Evangelicals overwhelmingly supported George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Northland Pastor Hunter says he hasn’t changed his beliefs about pro-life issues one bit.
“The problem has become that we have paid so much attention to the human being in the womb that we have forgotten about the human being out of the womb,” Hunter said. “It’s become such a focus for some leaders that they don’t want to address the other pro-life issues, such as climate change, such as poverty, such as AIDS.”
Last year, the Christian Coalition asked Hunter to become its president. He agreed, as long as he could spotlight attention on non-sexual issues, such as the environment and poverty. At the last moment, both sides got cold feet and the union was called off.
It was an early test of what may be a coming generational shift. For years, Falwell, Robertson and Dobson dominated the Christian message. But now, some younger evangelicals are complaining that the old message focuses more on what Christians are against than on what they are for.
The result may be that the evangelical vote isn’t as locked-up Republican as it has been since the Reagan years. There may be enough defections — either to Democrats or to simply not vote — to cause some further swing in elections in the future.
Interesting times, perhaps …
I must admit I don’t understand how evangelical Christianity got off on the “kick” of anti-gay/anti-abortion/anti-poor/anti-science/anti-separation-of-church-and-state/anti-drug/pro-gun/pro-war. From claiming to follow the bible (or for that matter claiming to have read it in the first place) how did they get to all that other stuff that’s barely even mentioned in the bible? And go so far afield from stewardship of the Earth and caring from the poor? How did that happen?
It isn’t like I haven’t studied the problem but I am still missing something.
Part of it was a response to the cultural and legal shift of the 60s-70s, capped by Roe v. Wade. Both as grass roots and at the hands of savvy leadership, the RR mobilized around the issues of abortion, school prayer, and, more recently, gay rights and evil-ution. While couched in terms of morality, these are all fought as political, not moral, issues. In other words, rather than trying to persuade and teach, they seek to gain political clout to legislate and rule. That’s an easy trap to fall into, and seductively pulls you away from, oh, caring for the poor, the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned …
The measure became not how many were brought to God (except in terms of showing off how big their religious arenas became), but how many representatives were elected. Not quite what Jesus would do.
Hmm… there still seems to be a piece of the puzzle missing, or maybe several pieces. Is there a religious-right equivalent to Susan Jacoby’s History of American Secularism? (something as neutral and non-polemical) If so I’d like to read it.
Here’s one post from Max Blumenthal – Age Of Intolerance in which he relates Falwell’s early work against desegregation, and how that conflict helped the religious right gain traction.