The New Evangelical Politics

Anyone who still doubts that the evangelical Christian world is going through a political revolution was not watching Pastor Rick Warren’s presidential forum this weekend. The era of reducing Christianity to a narrow set of ideological commitments is over.

Just a few years ago, who would have imagined that Barack Obama and John McCain
would hold a discussion of this sort in a church? Who would have
thought that the session would be moderated by an evangelical pastor
who was emphatic in counting both the Democrat and the Republican as
his “friends”? Who would have predicted that in such a setting, the
issues of abortion and gay marriage would not dominate the pastor’s
queries?

Oh, yes, and who would have anticipated that the passions of the
pastor in question would be engaged not in the divisions created by the
culture wars but in the imperative of civility in politics and the
plight of the world’s 148 million orphans? Here’s betting that the next
president will help some of those orphans find homes.

The notion that Christianity in general and evangelicalism in
particular are by nature right-wing creeds has always been wrong. How
can a faith built around a commitment to the poor and the vulnerable be
seen as leading ineluctably to conservative political conclusions?

And when political commentators talk about “evangelicals,” they are almost always talking about white
evangelicals, forgetting that millions of African Americans are devout
evangelical Christians and are hardly part of the conservative base.
The civil rights movement was one of the greatest faith-based
mobilizations in American history, even as it also drew on the energies
of thousands of secular liberals who walked hand in hand with
believers.

Warren is an important figure not just because he’s sold tens of
millions of books but also because he has been leading evangelicals out
of a political dead end that chose to ignore large parts of the
Christian message.

In 2004, Warren took the view that Christians should vote on a short
list of “nonnegotiable” issues, including abortion. But in 2006, on Fox News,
of all places, Warren declared: “Jesus’s agenda is far bigger than just
one or two issues. . . . We have to care about poverty, we have to care
about disease, we have to care about illiteracy, we have to care about
corruption in government, sex trafficking.” That is the new politics of
evangelical Christianity.

None of this means that white evangelicals will convert en masse to the Democratic Party.
McCain, who carefully touched every hot button on the control panel of
religious conservatism, will certainly get a substantial majority of
their votes. The question is whether Obama can cut the Republican
margin among white evangelicals by, say, five or 10 points.

“If Obama ever establishes any kind of trust [with evangelicals],
there will be a noticeable shift,” the Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor
of Northland Church outside of Orlando and a leading evangelical
moderate, said in an interview. “It will not be huge, but it will be
significant.”

The fact that the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency took
place at all is a sign that both parties intend to fight for the votes
of religious Christians. And little-noticed is language in this year’s
draft Democratic platform that “strongly supports a woman’s decision to
have a child” by ensuring access to health care, income support and
adoption programs. The platform also backs efforts to decrease the
“number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for
abortions.”

Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life, said her
group had sought much stronger abortion-reduction language. But the
discussion, she says, has changed a lot in just four years. “The
encouraging thing is that in 2004, we didn’t have any part in the
platform discussion,” she told me. “This time, the party wanted us as a
partner in the process. They reached out to us and wanted to hear what
we had to say.”

Will this make a difference? During his hour with Warren, McCain was
crisp and relentlessly on-message, no doubt winning over many for whom
opposition to abortion trumps all other causes. Obama was more a
wrestler than a boxer as he struggled with the big questions.

For a Democratic nominee four years ago, a meeting at Warren’s
church would have been an away game — if it had taken place at all.
This time around, Pastor Rick made sure that in a Christian house of
worship, there would be no home-court advantage.