Americans believe there’s too much religion talk in the public sphere, and these days, it’s especially easy to be cynical. Scratch the surface of any passionately held faith-based position between April and November of an election year, and find a political agenda. That’s because issues like gay marriage and religious liberty motivate voters in the right and left base who …
Why are evangelicals supporting immigration reform? Read More
White evangelical voters just aren’t as predictable as they used to be. That’s the news out of Iowa – and it’s bound to be reflected in Republican primary results all over the country. The most interesting poll data from the Iowa caucuses are these: Mitt Romney won in the cities. Rick Santorum won in the rural areas. In Iowa, where the vast majority of voters qualify …
Last week, Rick Warren sent this message to the nearly 500,000 people who follow him on Twitter: “Husbands & wives should satisfy each other’s sexual needs. 1 Cor 7:3.” His Twitter feed lit up with amens and retweets. “Oh gosh,” exclaimed one follower. Evangelical Christians want to talk about sex. And not in the same old punitive way. They want …
In evangelical Christian circles, “feminist” has traditionally been a dirty word. The three short syllables have done heavy work, telegraphing all the things the “Christian right” loves to hate about the “secular left.” A feminist, according to this definition, favors “abortion on demand, government-funded abortion, redistribution of wealth, same-sex marriage and is antiwar, anti-defense,” says Penny Nance, the CEO …
“Thou shalt not overspend” is rapidly becoming a tenet of the evangelical belief system, rivaling social issues like gay marriage. Can the gospel of thrift save our economy? The priorities of white evangelical Christians, about 60 million strong, have driven the culture wars for decades. It was they who formed the Moral Majority in the 1970s, which helped elect Ronald …
Evangelicals Preach the Gospel of Getting Out of Debt Read More
A growing conversation among Christian fundamentalists asks the question that may have been inevitable: is the oil spill in the gulf a sign of the coming apocalypse? About 60 million white evangelicals live in America, and about one third of them believe that the world will end in their lifetime, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and …
Redemption America’s evangelicals exiled their leader for insufficient orthodoxy. Now he’s back, and he’s unrepentant. Richard Cizik remembers it this way: he had just come home from a week in Australia and was about to jet off to Paris when he sat down on Dec. 2, 2008 for his post-election interview with NPR’s Terry Gross. She opened by asking him …
Richard Cizik – an unrepentant former evangelical leader Read More
A Ceasefire in the Culture War By making ‘abortion reduction’ a priority, Obama courts his frenemies. How does a democratic, pro-choice president avoid engaging in a culture war? This is the question that faces Barack Obama as he begins to shape his domestic policy. His presidency is not yet 100 days old, and already Obama has been excoriated by gays …
Before the election I wrote a piece for NEWSWEEK.com about white evangelicals and abortion. In that piece, I predicted that conservative Christians would not move in large numbers away from the Republican Party because of their fundamental theological and cultural objections to abortion. In response, I received many comments—mostly the usual entrenched rhetoric on both sides. But embedded in the …
Just as “race” has a whole new meaning in America this week, so, too, does “faith.” For at least four decades, white evangelicals have been the religion-and-politics story in this country. Their power, their rhetoric, their numbers, their theology