I want to explain something that is happening among evangelicals that should give you a lot of encouragement. A movement that calls itself “centrist evangelical” is emerging that is really saying something different than what the Religious Right has been saying. It is a truly major development.
Here are some examples:
1. The Evangelical Environmental Network is succeeding in getting most evangelical leaders signed up in a campaign to “Care for Creation.” Note the term: care for creation, that is, God’s creation; that is, it’s biblical. The drama of creation in the first chapters of Genesis is not the invention of new-age religion; it is thoroughly biblical. Care for creation is our term.
How many of you have heard of the campaign “What Would Jesus Drive?” This was conceived by Jim Ball, an evangelical. Jim even got CBS News in Los Angeles to film me riding my bike to work, and to ask me in an interview, “What would Jesus drive?”
Rich Cizik is the Washington representative of the National Association of Evangelicals, and he is speaking in many places about global warming and the need for conservation to care for creation.
David Neff, the editor of Christianity Today, wrote a strong editorial calling on the Bush administration to wake up to the reality of global warming and to the fact that we are running out of oil.
A significant statement was recently signed by most major evangelical leaders calling for strong action to form policies that achieve energy conservation and combat global warming. It was opposed by a few evangelicals on the Right who are afraid of criticizing President Bush.
2. There is a major campaign to alleviate poverty in much of the developing world. Rabbi Lerner calls it a Global Marshall Plan; we call it The One Campaign (www.bread.org). And Jim Wallis is leading a campaign to say “the budget is a moral document.” Last night my student, Amy, gave her testimony in class about the thrill of getting arrested with Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. Ron Sider was there too, as they protested the cuts to the poor, to Medicaid, to Pell grants for college loans, in the new budget plan, while $300 billion each year is being given in tax cuts for dividends, for capital gains, for the top tax brackets, and tax abolishment for all inheritances above $1 million.
3. Donna Schaper, the progressive pastor of Judson Baptist Church in New York, recently came to Washington to help protestors chain themselves to the Congressional building in protest against the House’s anti-immigration law. She expected 100 protestors, but there were 300, many of whom were evangelicals.
4. The cover story of the February issue of Christianity Today was “Why Torture is Always Wrong.” It was written by David Gushee, my friend and the coauthor of our book, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context. The best known and most admired of all evangelical pastors, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California, yesterday just signed the NRCAT statement against torture. He said to me: “Why would anybody want to defend torture ever? It corrupts the morality of the nation.” And he commended Dave Gushee’s article. Warren said, “If we condone torture, we yield the moral high ground to our enemies and encourage anyone who hates us to stoop to using that subhuman level against us. We reap whatever we sow.” Rick spoke prophetic words. Since then, two U.S. soldiers were found, tortured and murdered.
Jesus was tortured on the cross by the Roman Empire. How can evangelicals support any kind of torture?
The Bible teaches that all of us sin and that power corrupts, especially when dealing with the weak and vulnerable, so evangelicals know we need the restraint of law. Prisoners are the epitome of the weak and vulnerable. They need the protection of international law. Torture violates international law and Evangelicals want us to be law abiding. We want the U.S. to get back to being a law-abiding citizen of the world.
5. Polls show that many evangelicals are upset about the Iraq War. It is causing the deaths of too many people, and is costing too much money, cutting into critical government programs (e.g. the funds for levee repair were cut in half before Hurricane Katri-na hit). It is causing international outrage and anger because the U.S. based the war on a lie and broke the law by taking military action without the support of the UN. That anger feeds terrorism; it makes us less secure, not more secure.
Did you know the Pentecostals have formed the Pentecostal Peace Fellowship? And the Baptists have formed a Baptist Peace Fellowship? And the Catholics have formed Pax Christi? And that Every Church a Peace Church (www.ecapc.org) has links to about twenty such denominational peace fellowships?
The Religious Right is giving evangelicals a bad name. It is even giving Christians a bad name. It is building worldwide resistance against the gospel. Evangelicals care about spreading the good news of the gospel, and the authoritarianism of the religious right is bad news for the gospel.
So the good news is that there is a large group of centrist evangelicals moving away from the Religious Right.
But its leaders do not want to make it an anti-Bush movement. They want to make it a moral values movement. Many evangelical leaders are torn about whether to sign on because many of their constituents still have significant loyalty to George W. Bush.
Bush will be president only two more years. It’s not about a person; it’s about moral values. Will his successor make some of the right corrections? So we need to get the people in this movement to articulate these moral values, and we need to get political candidates who connect with values.
A major error of this administration has been to take the protection of international law away from prisoners of war. That sends a message that it will wink at torture. Without the protection of law, prisoners are defenseless, and soldiers who have been fired up to fight a war are more likely to victimize them. This has greatly increased the anger of the other side, making them more likely to torture our own soldiers when they are captured, and fueling the recruitment of terrorists. It makes us less safe, and it is morally and legally indefensible.
This administration has pulled us out of eight international treaties, has undermined the authority of the United Nations, has ignored the reports of the weapons inspectors that the weapons were not there, ignored the reports of the International Red Cross that torture and abuse of prisoners were happening, and undermined the international networks designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries like Iran and North Korea.
Evangelicals know that because of sin and the abuse of power, we need to be law abiding. Many evangelicals want the United States to support international laws and treaties, rather than putting our trust in the use of military weapons (Isaiah 30 and 31). We need to build security by returning to international cooperation.
Evangelicals have a deep heritage based in religious liberty, nonviolence, and the kind of teaching and persuasion that Jesus practiced. In our gratitude for what the gospel of God’s love and compassion means in our lives, we should spread the good news by teaching and persuasion, not by coercion. That’s very deep. If you want to enlist evangelicals in the cause, for heaven’s sake, don’t ask us to renounce our commitment to spreading the gospel by teaching, but also please don’t assume that we would want to teach and preach in a coercive way.
Sidebar
We fundamentalists have a problem. And that is why we fight day and night to prove that the Bible is infallible. And then after we fight day and night to prove that the Bible is infallible, we don’t do what it tells us anyway. When Jerry Falwell says “I believe the Bible,” I want to know whether he can believe in the war in Iraq when Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” We need to repent. Without repentance there is no spirituality. You say, “But that would be humiliating.” On the bicentennial anniversary of the United States we used this verse from Chronicles II (7:14) as the verse of the nation: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves… then I will hear, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” It is only a great nation that is capable of humbling itself.
—Tony Campolo, Founder, Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education
Glen Harold Stassen is a Christian theologian and ethicist. He is a contributor to Sojourners and currently the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He is recognized for his work on theological ethics, politics, and social justice.