Longtime Vote08 commenter Chuck Waller responds to yesterday’s post on the Gaza situation:

“Where was the rage ten days ago when Hamas rockets were killing Israeli  women and children?  The Israeli government kept asking, begging, and finally telling Hamas to stop or else.  They didn’t and now they are getting what they asked for.  Yes, they actually wanted this.  They can’t beat Israel, so they want the world to condemn Israel and come to the aid of the Arab terrorists.  This is exactly what was prophesied in the Bible, but, that’s not going to pull Israel down.  At this point, it would be good for all Americans to read the Old Testament book of Zechariah.  No one has seen rage yet.  That’s coming soon.  Thank you.  By the way, I’m a Christian, not a Jew.”

As always, thanks for your input, Chuck!

So let’s talk a little Zechariah, shall we?

At left: Michelangelo’s rendering of him on the Sistine Chapel.

Here’s the book’s Wikipedia entry.

The Book of Zechariah can be classified as prophecy. It was written after the fall of Jerusalem in the 6th Century BC.

Zechariah had a series of visions that gave comfort to Israelites who were looking to regain their homeland & be victorious over their enemies.

A sampling (from 14:12-16):

“This is the plague with which the Lord will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day men will be stricken by the Lord with great panic. Each man will seize the hand of another, and they will attack each other…Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles*.

So is Zechariah relevant to today’s situation?

I found a post on Tim Walker’s blog that echoes the concerns Chuck expressed above:

“In this case, is not defending yourself well within the context of acting righteously? To do anything less would be considered wicked and cowardly. Let’s see what else the Lord God might say in his word about Jerusalem;

Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling to all the peoples all around, and it shall also be against Judah in the siege against Jerusalem. And in that day I will make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all peoples. All who lift it shall be slashed, and all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it. (Zechariah 12:2-3 MKJV) [emphasis mine]

Would you consider the conflict between Israel and the entire Arab world a “burdensome stone”, and just how are the surrounding nations reacting? It is obvious once again that the stage appears to be being set for God’s final chapter of human history to begin, and most assuredly Israel will be involved.”

I would caution that using scripture (any scripture, from any religion) to justify violence is a dangerous road, not to mention that it exhibits somewhat of a hubristic presumption of what God’s plan is.

Rabbi (& blogger) Arthur Waskow, the founder & director of the Shalom Center, who contributes to the Newsweek/Washington Post blog “On Faith,” finds a way (with the help of Zechariah) out of this conundrum:

“The alternative for Hamas would have been to multiply the approach of the nonviolent boatloads of people who were in the last month bringing supplies to Gaza, ignoring or violating the Israeli blockade. This approach was building support in much of the world. Of course it was not enough to feed the whole people or heal them of disease, but it was pointing out the injustice and violence of the blockade. Instead of canceling the cease-fire and aiming rockets once again, they could have turned those boats into a multitude.

(A message to those who blindly support whatever Hamas does because they are the underdog: The teaching of the Prophet Zechariah is not just for Jews. It is about self-restraint when you have greater power, and it is about nonviolence — also a form of self-restraint — when you have lesser power. It is God’s word for everybody.)

The alternative for the Israeli government would be to say: — “Instead of scornfully rejecting the Saudi/ Arab League proposal for a region-wide peace settlement among Israel, all Arab states, and a viable Palestinian state, we encourage it, and encourage its proponents to press Hamas to join in, while making clear that for us the deal must include only very small symbolic numbers of Palestinian refugees returning to Israel itself, and control of the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. And we encourage, instead of blocking, a Palestinian government of national unity, including Hamas as well as Fatah. We will attend that peace conference tomorrow - tonight!

“And meanwhile, even if we missed the opportunity to do this before, now that we have proved how bloody we can be, now that no one can say we are negotiating from weakness, we seek as much peace as possible with Hamas — if not full recognition, then a 50-year truce (as one Hamas leader had proposed.) . We negotiate openly with Hamas toward ending the blockade, encouraging economic development inside Gaza, welcoming European and Egyptian aid and investment, releasing the members of their parliament we are holding in jail, and in exchange, get an end to the rocket attacks by Hamas and their acceptance of governmental responsibility to control other groups that may try to continue. We will use the checkpoints to prevent terrorist incursions into Israel, rather than preventing delivery of food and medicine to Gaza.

And the alternative for the U.S. government would be to use the disaster of this attack to call for all the above: To insist on a regional Middle East peace conference, to insist that even a Netanyahu government of Israel and even a Hamas leadership of Gaza or Palestine take part and accept a decent deal.”

I find this approach more palatable than one that hunkers down in hopes of getting a ringside seat to Biblical prophecy in action.

But don’t for a second think that the Muslim world is not also grappling with how their holiest book justifies violence.

Check out Madeline Bunting’s questioning of a passage in the Koran that reads “kill them - this is what disbelievers deserve:“

“The phrase above really worries me, I have to be honest.”

I would only add that this is healthy for any person of faith, & should be encouraged, & that it is worth the time & effort to struggle to find a deeper meaning, one which avoids violence altogether.

& it’s my hope that you see all these voices as contributing to a dialogue about how to move forward, & that one shouldn’t view any religion as completely monolithic.

What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with a comment!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Click here to view the embedded video.

Above: Apollo 8, 40 years ago this week. One of my favorite Christmas moments ever.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

I was out for much of last week & therefore missed much of the hoo-ha surrounding the president-elect’s choice of pastor Rick Warren to read the invocation at his inaugural.

For those (likely very few) of you who have not heard yet, Warren is a preacher whose stance against homosexuality runs contrary to the views of Barack Obama.

But that didn’t stop Obama from the invite:

Click here to view the embedded video.

..even though the move has angered folks on both the right & the left.

My 1st thought about this is that we’re likely seeing a microcosm of what we’ll see over the next four years. It’s, in its own way, a “Nixon-in-China” moment. It’s interesting to watch to see who gets uncomfortable.

My 2nd thought is that you’d never-in-a-million-years see a President-elect McCain extend such an invitation to someone perceived to be a foe of “his sides” “religion.”

It’s a shrewd move. & not just for Obama. (Read my post from earlier this year highlighting an excellent article on Warren’s role in a “new evangelical movement” here.)

E.J. Dionne thinks so too:

“Although I support same-sex marriage, I think that liberals should welcome Obama’s success in causing so much consternation on the right. On balance, inviting Warren opens more doors than it closes.

The always-curmudgeonly Richard Cohen, though, thinks the move is a wrong one:

“I can understand Obama’s desire to embrace constituencies that have rejected him. Evangelicals are in that category and Warren is an important evangelical leader with whom, Obama said, “we’re not going to agree on every single issue.” He went on to say, “We can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.” Sounds nice.

But what we do not “hold in common” is the dehumanization of homosexuals. What we do not hold in common is the belief that gays are perverts who have chosen their sexual orientation on some sort of whim. What we do not hold in common is the exaltation of ignorance that has led and will lead to discrimination and violence.”

But I think Melissa Etheridge, who happens to be gay, married, & with children, puts my thoughts about the matter best:

“Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world’s attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don’t hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.

Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.”

My take: Warren & Obama both are to be commended for their attempts to try to see all people as human beings, not just “friends or enemies,” which we have seen far, far too much of in the last 8 years. It’s a move in the right direction.

But I want to go on the record here as saying that I strongly disagree with Warren’s views on the nature of homosexuality & how society should treat homosexuals.

The arguments that allowing gays to marry is a “slippery slope” - “what’s next? man marries sheep?” - are ludicrous. How many people have you seen advocating their right to marry a sheep?

But Etheridge gets closer to what I believe is the truth in the matter, & why I’m confident that by the time I leave this mortal coil gays as a whole will be more a part of the American mosaic is this:

“Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.”

It has long been my experience that a person who doesn’t know anyone who is gay is far more likely to be “homophobic” than someone who does.

I hope it doesn’t surprise you that a number of homosexuals work at NewsChannel9. & I also hope it doesn’t surprise you that these employees orientation is accepted & treated as no big deal. Know why? Because each of these individuals are individuals. Just like you & me, they come down with colds .. wonder what they’re going to have for dinner .. complain about high gas prices .. etc, etc, etc. Thinking about a gay person’s sexuality comes into play in the workplace about as much as thinking about a straight person’s sexuality - meaning, it pretty much doesn’t. & that tolerance is no accident - it’s because exposure to people who favor their own gender demonstrates to you on a daily basis not their differences, but their similarities to you in many, many ways.

That’s my take, & you’re free to disagree with me in the comments. But this is all to say that while I did vote for Obama, & disagree with Rick Warren’s stance on homosexuality, all Americans with all viewpoints deserve a seat at the table.

It’s a move in the right direction.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[Above: me before the tree, Christmas Day, 1977. photo by my father]

I’ve celebrated Christmas as long as I can remember.

But there’s a part of the season these days that always bums me out, & that is people who try to make a point of saying “Merry Christmas.”

Now, I’ve long been a believer of the phrase “Merry Christmas.” As a writer for a newscast, I’ve tried to evenly & fairly distribute the words “Christmas” & “holidays.”

“Making out your Christmas list…”

“Doing their holiday shopping..”

etc.

I’ve never made a concerted effort to use only one phrase or the other.

And it absolutely drives me CRAZY to hear ads (& oh, do we ever hear a lot of ads in this business) that constantly do the watered-down Kool-Aid “Happy Holidays.”

A lot of folks have interpreted the actions of corporate culture as an actual assault on their Christian culture.

“I don’t know, I guess people are trying to be politically correct, but I don’t know what’s wrong with saying “Merry Christmas!”

The mayor of Cleveland, Tennessee even gave one of our reporters a button that said that. “We think it’s okay to say ‘Merry Christmas!’”

Well, listen.

I have a distaste for political correctness as much as the next person.. which is why, to the folks who think there’s a “War on Christmas,” I say:

You’re the ones who are over-the-top politically correct here.

You are the ones thrusting your victimhood on the rest of us, who just want to celebrate the season in peace.

Ask yourself: have you personally spoken with someone who says they feel uncomfortable when someone says ‘Merry Christmas’ to them? I would bet dollars to donuts that your answer is ‘no.’

Your anger (if you need to feel anger during the season, which, in my view, you shouldn’t) should be directed at the corporate culture, which is (wrongly) diluting the message in an effort to get every last dollar it can, as opposed to some non-Christian ‘boogeyman’ who’s trying to ruin your holiday.

Think you should say ‘Merry Christmas?’

Then say it! & be done with it!

The only person who has the power to ruin your holiday is the person you see in the mirror.

The last straw for me, in this ‘dumb controversy’ came with this story:

“For a second year, the grassroots campaign of five Ohio women to urge people to eschew “Happy Holidays” and instead opt for “Merry Christmas” is under way.

“I don’t know why it’s politically incorrect to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ ” said Joanne Brown of Poland, Ohio.

Members of the small group, all from northeast Ohio, say they want people to know it’s OK to say “Merry Christmas.” Last holiday season they raised $2,800 to put up four billboards to reverse what they claim is a negative trend.

The red and white signs carried the messages “I miss hearing you say Merry Christmas” and “Why have you stopped saying Merry Christmas?” Both were signed, “Jesus.”

…

Between 2007 and 2008, the “Merry Christmas Billboard Ladies” have taken in around $6,000 in donations — enough for seven billboards, according to the Youngstown Vindicator.”

.

$6,000.

A recent survey found that the average American family is spending $616 on Christmas this year.

So that means - let’s be drastic here, & cut that avg. cost in half - the money raised for these stupid billboards could have provided a Christmas to almost 20 needy families.

I find that obscene.

& what do you think Jesus would say to the women above?

It’s my belief that He would say “why are you wasting this money when people need help?”

Researching this story, I found this sermon from a Lutheran minister in Texas from 2006, that I think illustrates my point:

“…there are different kinds of power, most of them are quiet, unassuming, and actually more powerful. Jesus did not seek the limelight, he did not seek to be first, or popular, or influential. He didn’t try to get to some level of achievement and then use his power. He worked from wherever he was, to do whatever he could. On the road, in a person’s home, down by the lake. He used his power and made a difference in the inconspicuous places.

Someone once asked Leonard Bernstein, the celebrated orchestra conductor, “what is the hardest instrument to play?” Without a moment’s hesitation he replied, “Second fiddle. I can always get plenty of first violinists. But to find one who plays second violin with as much enthusiasm, or second French horn, or second flute, now that’s a problem! And yet if no one plays second, we have no harmony.” Think about that for a minute. The ones who make the music have harmony, are the second violins, second flutes, second French horns. They are the ones with the power to make the music what it is. Without them, there is no spine-tingling richness, no drama, no resolution of chords.”

What’s more, 2nd fiddles don’t feel the need to put up billboards or hand out buttons.

Anyway, kids, that’s the story of the dumbest Christmas controversy of them all. Rather than decry your victimhood, you should spread the true meaning of Christmas by reaching out to help those less fortunate than you.

Merry Christmas, etc. from Vote08

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

An interesting graph from SecularRight.org (h/t the Daily Dish) that shows people who are more partisan are more likely to pray more often.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

New Yorker Senior Editor Hendrik Hertzberg spoke before a group of students last night at Covenant College, up on Lookout Mountain last night during a gathering storm.

The media release promised Hertzberg would “will provide an “autopsy” of the 2008 election, along with a question-and-answer time of dialogue with the audience.“

Which, of course, is why I attended.

But the dissection of campaign 2008 was the warmup act (he pointed out that Obama did better than Reagan in the popular vote, completely ignoring Reagan’s better electoral college showing in 1980 - Hertzberg’s never been a fan of the EC); the main event was a challenge to the professed faith of the audience of about 150. (Hertzberg called it “playing the Village Athiest.”)

After noting the size of the crowd for little-old-him - calling it his “Barack in Denver” moment - & outlining his longtime skepticism for organized religion in general & Christianity in particular, Hertzberg asked for a show of hands.

“How many of you believe in God?”

A majority of hands went up.

“How many of you believe that God is paying close attention to your actions?”

A majority of hands went up.

“How many of you believe that those who don’t believe in God, or subscribe to another religion, but who live good lives & do good works, will still go to hell?”

Again, a majority of hands went up.

“How many of you believe I am going to hell?”

Ditto.

Once he finished outlining & defending what I suppose one could call a “fervent secular progressivism,” he opened the floor to questions.

I asked a politically-related question that he branded - to the titters of the crowd - “more of a thesis than a question,” which in retrospect was so laughably pathetic - overthought & overwrought - I won’t recount it here.

Driving back down the mountain after it was over I realized that this really wasn’t a discussion of politics at all; it was a unique opportunity for many Covenant students (the majority of whom, it’s safe to assume, come from a strong religious background) to be exposed to a point of view they likely hadn’t heard before (kudos should be given to whomever asked him to speak). These students were being forced out of their comfort zone by a man whose logic was razor sharp.

Many students did challenge him. Many were very assured of their beliefs - much like Hertzberg.

& that’s when I came to the conclusion that while Hertzberg could be labelled a consummate elitist, he wasn’t the only one in the room who could be branded as such. These young, impassioned, full-of-faith folks could also be described as elitists.

& the matchup was fairly equal; Hertzberg has likely honed his rhetorical challenges to religion over the years among friends at dinner parties on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, whereas many of the students were still relatively wet behind the ears (due to nothing more than their youth) in defending their points of view.

It made for interesting theater, in a way.

While I found myself agreeing with both sides of the argument on separate occasions, I did feel like I was one of the only people in the room who didn’t neatly fit into either ideology.

Which, of course, made me wonder who the true ‘elitist’ in that room was.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Above: watch the ABC story on the ad the McCain campaign ultimately decided not to run (it appears 76 seconds into this clip).

Would it have made a difference?

I think perhaps mildly, but not enough to change the outcome.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

I’ve stumbled across two reasoned arguments about the gay marriage issue, one against, & one for, that treats either side with respect.

Both show a true desire for not just understanding, but also - & most important, one could argue - reconciliation.

I think you’ll find ideas you can agree with in both pieces.

Read them both to see how it’s done.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

“I have no belief in the virtue or durability of official philosophies, and when it comes to state religions, I have always thought that, though they may perhaps sometimes momentarily serve the interests of political power, they are always sooner or later fatal for the church.

Nor am I one of those who think that to exalt religion in the eyes of the people and to do honor to the spirituality of religious teaching, it is good to give its ministers indirectly a political influence which the laws refuse.

I am so deeply convinced of the almost inevitable dangers which face beliefs when their interpreters take part in public affairs, and so firmly persuaded that at all costs Christianity must be maintained among the new democracies that I would rather shut priests up within their sanctuaries than allow them to leave them.” - Alexis de Tocqueville, whose “Democracy in America” should be required reading in every American high school.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Hoo-boy.

Kathleen Parker, already on thin ice for her criticism of Sarah Palin during the campaign, may be setting herself up for a good old-fashioned stake burning among religious Republicans with her column today:

“..the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

It isn’t that culture doesn’t matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.”

While I think she goes a bit too far in painting with a broad brush (”gorilla” “oogedy-boogedy” (?)) I think I agree with the point she’s trying to make. The problem with the approach of many hardcore conservatives is it is far too “exclusive.” The mentality of “you’re either with us or against us.” There has been far too much insistence that the party’s national-ticket candidates, not to mention those farther down-ballot, “toe the party line” on each issue, particularly each issue that deals with faith.

This had been a problem with Democrats for many years, especially on the issue of abortion. & look where that kept them from, say, 1988 to this year.

A sign of a strong party is a willingness to have a big tent. A sign of a weak party is a pronounced intolerance for impurity.

What do you think?

UPDATE:

Jonah Goldberg:

“For the record, I have no problem with arguments about how the GOP has become too religious. I ended my book with pretty much that argument. I opposed Mike Huckabee vociferously because he seemed the quintessential rightwing progressive imbued with a rightwing social gospel. These are all good arguments to make and they have good responses to them. But please drop the nonsense about how the G-O-D people or the Palin people are low brows and beasts. There are low brows and beasts everywhere, on every side of the ideological spectrum. Maybe if you got more ecumenical hate email you’d realize that.”

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Their presidential candidate lost and their influence in national politics may be waning, but white born-again Christians clearly won the 2008 election in Tennessee.
Even for the buckle of the Bible Belt, their majority was surprising - two of every three white voters in Tennessee identified themselves as evangelical Christians in exit polls.
This in a state where 84 percent of the voters are white.
Political pollster Ken Blake says the importance that John McCain’s supporters put on shared values underscores the role that religion plays in Tennessee presidential politics. Those values included opposition to abortion.
McCain carried Tennessee but lost the election. Yet white evangelicals likely helped elect new Republican majorities in the Tennessee Legislature.
Overall, 52 percent of Tennessee voters were white born-again Christians. Only Arkansas, with 55 percent, was higher.

Other interesting factoids about November 4th & the religious:

-More evangelicals voted for McCain than voted for Bush in 2004.

-12 million self-described ‘weekly churchgoers’ voted for Obama.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[image: Albrecht Durer. This famous image was actually a study of hands for a bigger painting, rather than a stand-alone work]

Via Charles Waller, a local Channel9 viewer & a man who’s had lots of good thought-provokers both in my e-mailbox & here on the blog:

“DAN–THIS IS MY ANSWER TO THE ELECTION. I’M SURE YOU REALLY WANTED TO HEAR FROM ME AGAIN. I’M VERY EXCITED TO SEE WHAT GOD IS GOING TO DO NEXT, AREN’T YOU?

Subject: A Christian’s View of the Presidential Election

The American people turned out in record numbers to elect Barack Obama as the next president of the United States.

Some Christians feared that this was the wrong choice for our country.

The vote is in. It can’t be changed. Rather than complain about the fact that McCain wasn’t elected, it’s time to take up our duty as Christian Americans — P-R-A-Y.

Pray for our new President. Pray for our new Vice President. Pray for their safety and for the safety of their families. Pray that they lead our country in the way that it should go. Pray that Obama and his administration bring our country to a brighter place, whether we voted for him or not.

Now is not the time to fret over the future of our country, but rather stand behind and pray for its leaders to take us to a better place. For the Lord God said “Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9)

God is still in control, not matter who sits in the Oval Office. God sits at the Throne, and has and always will have the ultimate power in our lives.

So stand behind our new president. Stand behind our country. And as Christians, set the right example of a people who will not be discouraged, who will not be afraid, but who will remember that God has all things in his control.

Even if you didn’t vote for our new president, remember this: “If God loved us that much, then we should love each other.” (John 1, 4:11)

You might not love our country’s choice for our next president, but as Christians, we can show him God’s love by standing behind him as Americans and praying for him to govern wisely.

We all know prayer works. If you’re concerned about the future of our country, put it in God’s hands, and pray.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[this post originally appeared on August 8th]

Both Obama & McCain wrote an essay on the role religion plays in their lives.

Read McCain’s here.

Read Obama’s here.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Palin Calls Rush

Read the transcript here.

Above: Hank Williams, Sr. sings a new twist on his old song “Family Tradition.”

Above: the ladies on ‘the View’ debate whether Palin is “Cheney in a Dress.”

A Christian’s Argument Against Her

Former GOP presidential candidate (who also once ran against Barack Obama) Alan Keyes makes the Christian argument against Sarah Palin. The basis of this argument is that John McCain is not truly anti-abortion:

“What happens when President McCain joins forces with the pro-abortion Democrats to remove restrictions on research that involves destroying embryonic life? If Vice President Palin speaks out publicly in disagreement with the decision, she will violate her pledge of loyalty to the president. She will also risk introducing divisions into the executive branch that are inconsistent with the clear language of the Constitution. If she keeps silent, she risks giving scandal to fellow Christians in the way St. Paul warned against in his first letter to the Corinthians:

For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. (1 Corinthians 8: 10-12)”

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

[Above: the Rhea County courthouse. For those of you reading this blog in other parts of the nation, Dayton, Tennessee is located about a half an hour north of Chattanooga.]

From yesterday’s Dayton Herald-News:

DAYTON INVITES SARAH PALIN TO SPEAK

Will Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, star of the recent Republican National Convention, be visiting Dayton in the near future? Dayton’s Randall McGinnis hopes so and so do a lot of community leaders.
Palin, a relative unknown before John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential running mate, became an overnight sensation in Republican circles with her convention speech last Wednesday.
McGinnis, who used to live in Alaska, thought, “why not ask her to come speak in Dayton?”
“This is essentially the buckle of the Bible Belt,” McGinnis said last week. “Palin is going to be the candidate of evangelicals, so what better place to speak than on the steps of the Rhea County Courthouse where William Jennings Bryan so eloquently defended evangelical Christianity in 1925?”
McGinnis broached the subject with friends at the American Legion hall in Dayton and found they were all in support of it, so he decided to take the ball and run with it.
He contacted local officials and community groups and asked them to write letters of invitation. He has already collected letters from several local organizations, including Bryan College and The Family Church.
Rhea County Executive Billy Ray Patton, the Dayton Chamber of Commerce, the Rhea County Republican Party and the Rhea County Veterans Committee have all promised to write letters this week, according to McGinnis, who asks that other local organizations draft letters of invitation as well.
McGinnis plans to place all the letters in the hands of Congressman Zach Wamp as soon as possible, and Wamp has agreed to hand-deliver the letters to the McCain-Palin campaign staff in Washington, D.C.
“We’re 100 percent behind Mr. McGinnis’s efforts,” said Rhea County Road Supervisor Tommy Snyder who is a leader in the Rhea County Republican Party. “We’ll do whatever we can to help.”
McGinnis said if Palin does accept his invitation, he would like to make it a regular election year event to host the presidential or vice presidential candidate wishing to address conservative Christians nationwide.
“I’d like to see Dayton back on the national stage like it was in 1925 during the Scopes Trial, except now I’d like to be for a better reason,” McGinnis said.
John Carpenter can be contacted at john.carpenter@rheaheraldnews.com

What are the chances of this happening? Well — I hate to break it to the folks in Dayton, but if I were you I would expect her to decline the invitation & be pleasantly surprised if the opposite turns out to be true.

Electorally, McCain has no reason for campaigning in the state of Tennessee. Look at the state’s poll numbers & see why. It would be a waste of resources. [& by the way, the good news for you - &, frankly, bad news for us, in terms of the station's bottom line - is that means you'll see a lot fewer TV ads in this market]

But it’s smart for Daytonians to use the “what Dayton represents to evangelical Christianity” tactic, though. I give the chances of a Palin visit to Dayton happening at about 30%.

MORE: Here’s a good piece on Dayton, Tennessee’s contribution to American history, as referenced above:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What do you think? Will she come to Dayton? Post a comment & share your thoughts!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

#1. Sarah Palin’s Click here to view the embedded video.

#2. Abraham Lincoln’s:

“Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right”

#3. Bob Dylan’s: Click here to view the embedded video.

What do you think?

EARLIER: The Candidates’ Views on Faith

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Obama’s favorite Bible verse(s): Matthew 5:1 - 7:29

Bible verse he should revisit: Proverbs 11:2

McCain’s favorite Bible verse: Matthew 7:12

Bible verse he should revisit: Matthew 16:26

That’s my 2 cents. What’s yours? What scripture is relevant to either candidate, or to this campaign? Hit the comment button & let us know!

EARLIER:

The Candidates on Faith

Obama Leading the Faith Vote

The Annotated/Illustrated “the New Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

From a new survey from the Barna Group: 

For the most part, the various faith communities of the U.S. currently support Sen. Obama for the presidency. Among the 19 faith segments that The Barna Group tracks, evangelicals were the only segment to throw its support to Sen. McCain. Among the larger faith niches to support Sen. Obama are non-evangelical born again Christians (43% to 31%); notional Christians (44% to 28%); people aligned with faiths other than Christianity (56% to 24%); atheists and agnostics (55% to 17%); Catholics (39% vs. 29%); and Protestants (43% to 34%). In fact, if the current preferences stand pat, this would mark the first time in more than two decades that the born again vote has swung toward the Democratic candidate.

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Both Obama & McCain wrote an essay on the role religion plays in their lives.

Read McCain’s here.

Read Obama’s here.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

One of the essential reads of the summer, from the June 30th issue of the New Yorker. It takes a look at how the GOP should not count on a monolithic voting bloc from evangelicals for this year’s race to the White House. This is the 2nd of our series of “annotated” New Yorker articles, designed to help you with links & clips pertinent to the original article.. read the 1st effort here, & read our latest efforts below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Pew)

Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. In their own gatherings, they proposed such things as the abolition of the capital-gains tax, a war on radical Islam, and an end to the “myth of separation” between church and state, but they concentrated their public campaigns on gay rights and abortion, the two issues that have resonated most strongly with evangelicals and helped to bring them into the Republican Party.

Under the leadership of James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family,

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and others, including Richard Land, the official in charge of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, activists organized “values voters” with the help of ballot initiatives in eleven states for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage.

In November, all the initiatives passed, and George W. Bush took seventy-eight per cent of the white evangelical vote—a record for a Presidential candidate. Because evangelicals make up a quarter of the population, the religious right claimed credit for giving President Bush his margin of victory.

This year, however, is very different. During the primary season, religious-right leaders could not unite around a candidate.

On Super Tuesday, thirty per cent of evangelical Republicans voted for John McCain, the favorite of moderates and independents.

Even more surprising, a third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee chose to vote Democratic, as did, a month later, forty-three per cent in Ohio.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama—unlike John Kerry, in 2004—has been trying to win over white evangelicals. In televised discussions sponsored by religious organizations, he has spoken of his faith, and framed issues such as health care and the war in Iraq in moral terms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In recent weeks, he has met privately with evangelical leaders and started to reach out to values voters. These efforts suggest that he is hoping to do as well as, if not better than, Bill Clinton, who won a third of the white evangelical vote in both 1992 and 1996.

Mark DeMoss, a public-relations expert whose firm has worked for Focus on the Family and for Franklin Graham, is among those who think he can.

This view is based in large part on the fact that religious-right activists are no longer the only evangelical leaders speaking out.

Since 2004, influential pastors and the heads of many large faith organizations have set a new national-policy agenda, one founded on their understanding of the life of Jesus and his ministry to the poor, the outcast, and the peacemakers. The movement has no single charismatic leader, no institutional center, and no specific goals. It doesn’t even have a name. But it is nonetheless posing the first major challenge to the religious right in a quarter of a century.

Dr. Joel C. Hunter, the senior pastor of Northland church in Orlando, Florida, who every week preaches to ten thousand people in his church and through the Internet, is one of the new leaders. Long active in community affairs, he has become an activist on the national level. He has lobbied Congress for legislation to curb global warming, pressed for comprehensive immigration reform, and denounced the virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican primaries. He has worked with a group of evangelicals and secular progressives to try to establish common ground on such polarizing issues as abortion and the role of religion in public life. “I think the way we have been dealing with differences in this country simply doesn’t work,” Hunter told me recently. He is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, and with his fellow-members he has condemned Bush Administration policies permitting torture and the inhumane treatment of detainees. He has also twice attended the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, an annual gathering of American and Muslim leaders in Qatar, sponsored by the Brookings Institution. After the first meeting, where Hunter discovered that even the American diplomats assumed that all evangelicals believed that Israel had a Biblical right to the Palestinian territories, he and eighty-three colleagues sent an open letter to President Bush, calling for a two-state solution and justice for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. The statement was “hardly revolutionary,” Hunter said, with a grin, “but it was subversive,” meaning subversive of the religious right.

In “The Future of Faith in American Politics,” David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University’s school of theology, in Atlanta, notes that the movement’s leaders are theological conservatives who share the concerns of the religious right about sex outside of heterosexual marriage, the preservation of the family, and abortion. However, many leaders, such as Hunter, oppose government coercion on issues of private morality, and all have what Gushee calls a “consistent pro-life agenda”—one that accords with Catholic social teachings on war, poverty, and human rights. Moreover, they lack the cultural attitudes descended from the fundamentalist resistance to modernist thought, such as a distrust of science, a rejection of institutional solutions to poverty, and the notion that evangelicals are the saving remnant of Christianity and the American tradition.

Religious-right leaders have perpetuated these attitudes and done their best to see that evangelicals continue to regard themselves as an embattled subculture.

The new leaders, however, embrace pluralism. Unlike the right, they don’t engage in partisan politics, but many of the policies they espouse coincide with those of the Democratic Party. What they aspire to is nothing less than an end to the culture wars and the polarization of American politics.

The movement is new, but there is a sizable constituency for it. According to polls taken in the past four years, half of all evangelicals have substantial differences with the religious right. As Mark Pinsky, a veteran religion writer at the Orlando Sentinel, has observed, Sun Belt evangelicalism is very different from that of the old Bible Belt: suburban families trying to get their kids into college don’t believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and they don’t join crusades to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Furthermore, they don’t like the angry intolerance of the religious right and cringe when they are associated with it. If Hunter and the others succeed in winning over this group, they will either change the Republican Party beyond the recognition of Karl Rove or doom it to electoral defeat for many years to come.

Before 2004, only three evangelical leaders publicly challenged the religious right’s agenda: Jim Wallis, of Sojourners; Tony Campolo, a well-known Baptist preacher; and Ron Sider, the president of Evangelicals for Social Action. All three founded activist organizations in the nineteen-seventies, but, as energetic and articulate as they are, their constituencies seemed permanently confined to a progressive minority.

Then, just at the moment of the religious right’s triumph in the 2004 election, the new movement came to life. In October of that year, the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella organization of denominations and churches which claims a constituency of thirty million, voted to accept a position paper laying out seven principles for Christian political engagement. The document, “For the Health of the Nation,” called upon evangelicals not only to safeguard the sanctity of life and to nurture families but also to seek justice for the poor, protect human rights, work for peace, and preserve God’s creation. The document was worded so as not to provoke a conservative reaction, but the following spring Richard Cizik, the N.A.E.’s vice-president for governmental affairs, and other N.A.E. progressives in Washington moved ahead with an agenda that included lobbying for debt relief for the poorest countries and galvanizing support for legislation to curb global warming.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That summer, Mark Noll, a prominent evangelical historian now at the University of Notre Dame, told a journalist that “For the Health of the Nation” was “an effort to bring out of the background things that have always been there but have been overshadowed by the concentration on life issues.” He added, “Evangelicals don’t want themselves identified as the Republican Party at prayer.” As he suggested, some evangelical leaders had wanted to take new directions for years; by 2005 they were further motivated by their embarrassment at the association of all evangelicals with the Bush Administration.

The advocates for the new agenda have come to include some of the most influential evangelicals, among them Rick Warren, the author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” and the pastor of Saddleback church, in Orange County, California, who is, after Billy Graham, the best-known evangelical preacher in the country. Warren heads a network of pastors and laymen, and just before the 2004 election he sent out a letter to a hundred and thirty-six thousand of them saying that pro-life and pro-family issues should determine their vote. But a few months later he sent the same network a letter urging them to put pressure on Bush to increase foreign aid, provide debt relief, and reform trade rules to help the global poor. In April of 2005, he called upon his congregation to support an effort in Rwanda to alleviate hunger, teach literacy, and slow the spread of AIDS. His ultimate goal, he announced, was to enlist a billion Christians worldwide in the struggle against poverty, illiteracy, and disease.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Warren had, it seemed, undergone a form of conversion. “I have been so busy building my church that I have not cared about the poor,” he told pastors in Kigali. “I have sinned and I am sorry.” At an international Baptist convention that summer, he called for “a second Reformation,” one that would be about “deeds not creeds.”

Since then, Bill Hybels, the pastor of the Willow Creek church, in South Barrington, Illinois, and the leader of an association of twelve thousand churches, has put his congregation to work on racial reconciliation in the Chicago area, the global AIDS epidemic, and poverty in Africa. He and others, including the presidents of evangelical seminaries and colleges, have signed well-publicized open letters on issues from global warming to Darfur, and some have criticized the religious right and the policies of the Bush Administration.

A pivotal figure in the movement, David Neff, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today Media Group, has done all three. He has changed his flagship magazine from a fairly conservative publication into one that has taken the lead in discussions of sensitive subjects like divorce and issues like climate change. He drafted “For the Health of the Nation,” and helped prepare a manifesto for the movement, which was released in May. Signed by seventy-three of its leaders, Joel Hunter among them, the manifesto declares that evangelicals see it as their duty “never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system or nationality,” because “that way faith loses its independence, the church becomes ‘the regime at prayer,’ Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology.”

There have even been stirrings from within the Southern Baptist Convention. The largest of the evangelical denominations, the S.B.C. has long been dominated by conservatives closely aligned with the right wing of the Republican Party. But in the 2006 election for the S.B.C. presidency dissident pastors persuaded their fellows, via blogs, to reject the establishment candidate.

The S.B.C. elected instead Frank Page, a mildmannered South Carolina pastor who has encouraged the moderates and avoided partisan politics.

“We’re at a watershed in our history,” Joel Hunter told me over lunch at his home in Orlando. “What has passed for an ‘evangelical’ up to now is a stereotype created by the people with the loudest voices.

But there’s a whole constituency out there that it doesn’t apply to. Now something is happening. You can feel it like the force of a tsunami under the water.” It was a hot day, but the windows of Hunter’s small house looked out onto one of the numerous lakes in the area. Relaxed and for once without a suit jacket—he usually wears a gray suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie—he paused while his wife, Becky, a petite blond woman in a tailored dress, poured us coffee. He went on to talk about the roots of Anglo-American Protestantism.

“Have you read Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book ‘The Roads to Modernity’? It’s about the difference between the French and the English Enlightenment — the French, who focussed on reason, and the English, who were more theistic and linked reason to acts of compassion.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hunter, who is sixty, is trimly built, not tall, and so unassuming that it’s often hard to imagine him as a megachurch pastor. On the days he preaches, he parks his car in the lot farthest from the church so that others are not inconvenienced, and at staff meetings he listens a good deal more than he speaks. He often opens his sermons with folksy stories, but he is something of an intellectual, and more of an introvert than most in his congregation know. To have time to himself, Hunter gets up at four in the morning, and after making his devotions and answering e-mails he goes to the stacks of books piled up on the floor of his study. He reads eclectically in philosophy, science, history, and current affairs, and rereads a Jane Austen novel every year.

Hunter often speaks as if his role in the new movement were just something that fell upon him—and in the beginning that was more or less the case.

In the autumn of 2005, Jim Ball, the head of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and Richard Cizik were gathering signatures for an Evangelical Climate Initiative and a statement expressing alarm about man-made global warming and calling for a mandatory curb on carbon emissions. “Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors,” the statement read.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hunter signed it, along with eighty-five other evangelical leaders, and, as a megachurch pastor in a state vulnerable to climate change, he was chosen to do a nationally broadcast television spot for the initiative. After that, he said, “one thing led to another.” But Hunter, who quickly saw the potential of the movement, worked hard to see that it did. In the spring of 2006, he published a new version of a book he had written in 1988, when Pat Robertson was running for President, in which he argued that the evangelical right confused the power of the Cross with the power of government and misunderstood the nature of American democracy. Evangelicals, he wrote, should participate in politics—indeed, as Christians and as citizens they had a duty to do so—but they should understand that they constituted a special-interest group, one of many in a pluralist society.

Around the time Hunter’s book was published, Roberta Combs, an acquaintance, invited him to succeed her as the president of the Christian Coalition. Founded by Pat Robertson, the Coalition had in the nineteen-nineties been the largest religious-right organization in the country, known for the millions of voting guides it distributed to churches, but it has lost members and financial support in recent years. Hunter’s friends were flabbergasted, but instead of rejecting the offer he presented the board with a proposal to turn the Coalition into a grassroots organization that would help pastors work on issues such as poverty and the environment. In view of the group’s financial deficits, the board members agreed, but, a month before Hunter was to formally take office, they parted ways, citing “differences in philosophy and vision.” The affair nonetheless brought him national press attention, and since then he has taken on active roles in other national evangelical organizations — Becky has become the president of the Global Pastors’ Wives Network—and he speaks all over the country on the issues he cares about.

Hunter, who does not like to be thought of as earnest, told me that he was having more fun than he had had since college. “This is like the most idealistic, visionary time of my life,” he said. In fact, he has brought together the two parts of his life that had been separated since the nineteen-sixties.

Born in 1948, in Shelby, a small county seat in northern Ohio, Hunter grew up well outside the evangelical orbit. His father, a decorated Second World War veteran, died of cancer when Joel was four, and his mother became an alcoholic. To support him and his older sister, she worked as a beautician. Three years later, she married a devout Catholic who worked in a carbon-paper factory. Joel attended a Methodist church with his grandparents, and went to public school. In 1966, he enrolled at Ohio University, where he majored in history and government, and was swept up in the student activism of the period.

He didn’t demonstrate against the Vietnam War, because there were many military men in his family, but, as he remembers it, that was the exception: “If the mashed potatoes were lumpy in the cafeteria, we were out there with placards.” He believed that his generation would change the world, and he idolized Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. When they were assassinated and the student movement split into angry factions, Hunter’s disillusionment was profound. He turned to the religion of his youth, and, on graduating, went to seminary in Indianapolis.

Hunter spent fifteen years in the United Methodist Church, first as a youth pastor in Greenfield, Indiana, where he met and married Becky, who was a college student at the time, and later as a minister of a small rural church and as a pastor in a growing suburb of Indianapolis, where, under his leadership, the congregation grew from two hundred to a thousand in seven years. The United Methodist Church was a liberal Protestant denomination, but Hunter, inspired by one of his professors, had become a theological conservative and an evangelical. That hadn’t mattered to his congregations or to the denomination, which allowed its ministers latitude as long as they were building strong churches. At thirty-seven, he thought he had everything he could ask for: the second-largest church of its denomination in the state, a good salary (he and Becky by then had three young sons), and a new parsonage. But it made him uneasy. “There’s something in me as a child of the sixties that is very suspicious of establishment success,” he said. “I questioned if I was just doing it because of the perks. Did I really have what it takes to walk away from it?” He spent three days praying and fasting in a cabin in the woods, and, shortly afterward, accepted an offer from Northland, an evangelical congregation of two hundred people, which had just lost its pastor.

Ten years later, Hunter was preaching seven services a weekend to accommodate five thousand congregants. After 2001, the church found quarters in other parts of Orlando where services could be broadcast simultaneously; last year it completed construction of a larger building next to the old one, which is now linked interactively with Northland congregations at other sites, partner churches overseas, and Internet users.

Many megachurches have sports facilities, a day-care center, a school, and social clubs, but Northland has never had such amenities, and it has never used marketing techniques to attract congregants. It has grown mainly because of the worship services. Hunter doesn’t preach pop psychology or self-help messages or a basic introduction to Christianity.

Beginning in 1991, he preached a ten-year series on achieving spiritual maturity, with each year devoted to a single topic. He is a populist preacher in the sense that he’s a good storyteller, witty and down to earth. But his great gift, according to Reggie Kidd, a professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary, near Orlando, is his ability to find the profound in simple things and to explain difficult concepts in ways that are easy to understand. In 1996, when Hunter felt that the congregation was ready, he changed the emphasis of his preaching from individual faith and mutual service to the need to serve the community as a whole. “He pushed us out,” Lori Droppers, a physical therapist who has been going to Northland with her husband and children for more than ten years, said. “It’s not a church that wants to gather you in with people of the same mind-set.” Sometimes, she said, “I do long for the ‘holy huddle,’ but it’s the right thing to do.” Few at Northland have objected to Hunter’s recent public advocacy. He told me, “When people have heard you explain the Scriptures for twenty some years, and when they know that you’re centered theologically, then when you bring issues like that up they are much more inclined to suppose that it is the next level of spiritual witness.”

Asked why the religious right retained such a hold, Hunter began by evoking the sense of alarm that evangelicals felt during the cultural upheavals of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. “When you are angry or afraid, the loudest voices carry the day,” he said. Speaking of the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons, he added, “I think they showed some courage and some leadership getting us into the public square. But it’s like in the sixties—guys like Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown. When I heard those guys talk, I thought, That makes me mad, too! I can’t believe how this could be happening in our country! But the more you listen the more you go, ‘Wait a minute. I see where you’re coming from, and that has some legitimacy, but I’m not going to give my life to that.’ ”

The religious-right leaders were also intimidating. Radio and television evangelists, they built powerful organizations, and they held the microphone. “Who in the world was going to stand up to Jim Dobson?” Hunter asked. All pastors knew how many people listened to Dobson and Falwell and received voting guides from the Christian Coalition, and those who were still building their churches couldn’t afford to introduce any kind of controversy. “You have to come to a certain stature in what you’ve done to even be on a playing field with a Jim Dobson or Pat Robertson,” Hunter said. In his view, it took not only a change in evangelical attitudes but also the emergence of a new generation of leaders with power bases of their own to challenge the right.

Hunter and others have come under attack from what Richard Cizik refers to as “the enforcers” of the evangelical community.

Rick Warren, for example, has been harshly criticized for inviting Barack Obama to an AIDS conference, and Hybels was attacked for asking Jimmy Carter to speak at a conference on leadership. Warren and Hybels can shrug off such assaults, but some less powerful leaders have removed their names from statements or otherwise backed down. Hunter told me, “In the evangelical community, all you have to do is get accused of compromising your theology and you’re automatically labelled a traitor or a heretic or whatever. So I understand the pressure on these guys.”

Of all the initiatives the new movement has taken, that on global warming has provoked the most fury from the right. Before the Evangelical Climate Initiative statement was released, in February of 2006, James Dobson, Richard Land, and others wrote to the N.A.E. saying that global warming was not a consensus issue, and they raised enough opposition on the board to prevent Cizik from signing it. The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a group supported by Dobson and other prominent right-wingers, argued that man-made global warming was an unproved theory and that policies designed to combat it would slow economic development and hurt the world’s poor. Dobson and Tony Perkins, among others, also protested that a campaign against global warming would distract evangelicals from their mission to oppose abortion and support family values; John Giles, of Christian Action Alabama, told the Financial Times that it was an attempt to divide evangelicals and weaken the right. The showdown came at the annual N.A.E. meeting in March of last year.

Days earlier, Dobson and twenty-four other right-wingers, none of them N.A.E. members, wrote an open letter stating that Cizik had put forth “his own political opinions as scientific fact” and had used global warming to “shift emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.” They went so far as to suggest that Cizik, who had once spoken of the need for population control, might approve of abortion and infanticide, as practiced in China. This time, however, the board supported Cizik, and Hunter defended him publicly.

The conflict then moved to the Southern Baptist Convention. Last June, the S.B.C. passed an official resolution that questioned whether human activity contributes to global warming, and urged Southern Baptists to weigh the economic impact of policies designed to reduce greenhouse gases.

Then Jonathan Merritt, a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, heard a professor say that destroying God’s creation was akin to tearing a page out of the Bible. After consulting with S.B.C. theologians, Merritt drafted a statement calling the denomination’s engagement with the environment “too timid,” and maintaining that “our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.” The statement, released in March, was signed by forty-five leading Southern Baptists, including Frank Page.

The new movement has come at a difficult time for the religious right. The death of Jerry Falwell, last May, followed by that of D. James Kennedy, a televangelist and a mainstay of the right, seemed to herald the passing of the founding generation of leaders. Then there was the embarrassment of the Republican primaries. Last fall, religious-right leaders contemplated a field of candidates that included

a Mormon from Massachusetts;

a thrice-married Catholic from New York;

a non-churchgoing Hollywood actor;

a senator who in 2000 had called Falwell and Robertson “agents of intolerance”;

and a former Southern Baptist pastor.

The choice might have seemed clear, but it was not.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pat Robertson, who had been out of step for some time, picked Rudy Giuliani, the candidate all the others thought anathema.

Richard Land, who that fall had written that evangelicals ought to support a candidate they agreed with eighty per cent of the time on the moral issues, as opposed to one they agreed with a hundred per cent of the time, because the most moral candidate might divide the vote and allow the least moral to win, made it clear that Fred Thompson was his man.

Operating on the same principle, other leaders signalled support for Mitt Romney. Only one of the top leaders came out for Mike Huckabee, and none chose the winner, John McCain.

Then, when the televangelists John Hagee and Rod Parsley belatedly endorsed McCain, the Senator had to repudiate them, after Hagee was found to have made outrageous remarks about the Catholic Church and Jews, and Parsley to have attacked Islam. Their views had never been questioned when they supported George W. Bush.

The misfortunes of the right, coupled with the emergence of new evangelical leaders, have convinced a number of observers, notably E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, that the era of the religious right is over. Other experts, among them John C. Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, have called the obituaries for the right premature, if only because they have been written several times before. Still, at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in March, Dobson wondered “who will be left to carry the banner when this generation of leaders is gone.” He added, “The question is: will the younger generation heed the call?” The next day, Tony Perkins, aged forty-five, made the first bid for the succession.

He had just written “Personal Faith, Public Policy,” with Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., an African-American pastor with a church outside Washington, D.C., and, at a conference designed to publicize it, the two argued that the religious right was a coalition and that the way to save it was to broaden the agenda to include poverty, social justice, racial reconciliation, and global warming. The book turned out to be a compilation of right-wing bromides about the virtues of self-reliance and the vices of government intervention in a free economy. It was nonetheless an hommage to the new movement.

Hunter doesn’t predict the imminent demise of the religious right but he believes that the coalition of social, economic, and foreign-policy conservatives that made up Bush’s Republican Party cannot last, because the new social conservatives will insist on public as well as private morality, and won’t put up with a government that deprives the needy by cutting taxes on the rich and whose foreign policy is directed only toward enhancing American power. “The younger generation, that’s what’s driving this thing,” Hunter said. “We’ve got a bunch of kids now who are just reminding us, ‘Quit playing to the categories. They don’t matter. Try to get things done. That’s what matters.’ ”

Surveys of younger evangelicals support his view. According to Pew polls, while evangelicals aged eighteen to thirty care more about abortion than their elders, they are less bothered by gay marriage, more concerned about health care and the poor, and more likely to champion environmental causes.

In a poll conducted by Relevant, a magazine read by young college-educated evangelicals, fifty-five per cent called themselves conservative on issues of personal morality, but only thirty-four per cent said they were economic conservatives, and a mere fourteen per cent said they were conservative on issues such as health care and poverty. Most were against the war in Iraq, and of the two-thirds who said they had voted for Bush a third said they wouldn’t do it again.

How much headway the movement is making among evangelicals nationally is a question that won’t be settled by the election results in November. For one thing, Americans change their party allegiances slowly. In 2006, seventy-two per cent of white evangelicals voted for Republican congressional candidates, though polls taken before the election showed a much more significant decline in their approval for the Party. The Democrats may well pick up more evangelical votes this year, but for reasons that could be circumstantial. The same polls that reported a third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee and forty-three per cent in Ohio voting Democratic in the primaries also showed that evangelicals were more concerned with jobs and the economy than with gay rights and abortion. That was not the case in 2004, but it was in 1992, when Bill Clinton took a third of the evangelical vote. A lot also depends on the candidates. In Hunter’s church, many of the young are Obama enthusiasts, as are many educated young evangelicals. Last fall, Relevant readers, when asked who Jesus would vote for, picked Obama over all the other candidates then in the race, Republican and Democratic. In any case, Hunter and his colleagues haven’t endorsed a candidate or a political party. What they want is voters like Lori Droppers. “It was simple before—I just voted Republican,” Droppers said. “But now I don’t know.” With the help of her eighteen-year-old son, she was looking up on the Internet all the positions taken by the Republican and the Democratic candidates. “I’m confused,” she said. “And Joel is to blame.”

The campaign thus far has cheered Hunter. A registered Republican, he voted for Huckabee in the Florida primary on the ground that he was “the first iteration” of a new type of evangelical leader—someone who cared about climate change and the plight of the poor, and didn’t take himself all that seriously. “When I am looking for a candidate, I am looking for a person who doesn’t have his wallet or his gun where his heart should be,” he said at the time.

Hunter claims to be undecided about whom he will vote for in November. He gives McCain credit for having had the integrity “to go against the grain,” and he calls Obama “as fresh a face as we’ve had in a long time.” His hope is that whoever is elected will leave the country less polarized, but he’s not optimistic about the next several months. “Ultimately, the voices of coöperation will prevail,” Hunter said, “but I think it’s going to be a battle, and it’s going to get very nasty from now until November.”

I hope you enjoyed this food for thought. So what do you think? Are Christian evangelicals moving away from a single voting bloc this time around? If so, is that a good thing? If not, is that a good thing? Please weigh in on this, we’d love to hear from you!

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Click here to view the embedded video.

CHICAGO (AP) - Barack Obama is unveiling his plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups.
      In remarks obtained by The Associated Press for delivery today in Zanesville, Ohio, Obama says the challenges are “simply too big for government to solve alone.”
      David Kuo — a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives — says Obama’s proposal “is a massive deal.”
      But Obama’s support for letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions could bring protests from within his own party.
      The Reverend Barry Lynn, who heads Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says the Bush administration’s faith-based program “ought to be shut down, not continued.”
      Obama is also proposing a 500-million-dollar-per-year program to provide summer learning for 1 million poor children to help close achievement gaps with white and wealthier students.

Read more about the plan here, at the Chicago Tribune, at the Chicago Tribune, & read more about Obama’s feelings on faith in general here,  at his website (PDF file).

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

Here’s a report from a man whom I think is a good reporter, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, on the efforts of both candidates to court the Christian vote this year.

What do you think?

Post from: The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08