Thursday, November 09, 2006

Evangelical Politics

Is it the beginning of the end of the political domination of conservative evangelical Christianity? Charles Pierce says the job's just begun:

Its revival was cultural and political, not spiritual, and those secular underpinnings have crumbled under the combined weight of the knowledge now becoming general among the folks in question that a) a lot of their leaders are towering moral and personal hypocrites, and b) that, like David Kuo and John DiIulio before him, they have been played for suckers by politicians who don't deliver. The problem is not with their faith...it's the fact that it was put to use in areas where it had no business being in the first place, and it was inevitably used to further the more reactionary parts of the GOP agenda and, thereby, became publicly radicalized. It was an extremist religion to begin with, and it has become an extremist political movement. It can survive as the former...It has to be crushed as the latter, as do all the other enabling mechanisms of what passes for modern conservatism. Marginalize the worst of it.. That job began the other night.

1 comment:

Alexander Wolfe said...

I very much agree that evangelicals have a place in politics. And like I said in an earlier post, I do not believe that evangelicals in general want to keep Schiavo alive indefinitely, ban all legal rights for gays, and force kids to pray before a copy of the ten commandments in the classroom. But the evangelical movement has allowed itself to be represented politcally by evangelicals who do believe such things, to the detriment of our country. I very much believe that our political system needs to incorporate people with a greater range of political and religious values, and I support that trend among conservative evangelicals as well.