Some Evangelicals Upset about the “Evangelical Manifesto”

“Prominent evangelicals urged Christian conservatives Wednesday to support “an expansion of our concerns beyond single-issue politics,” angering some leaders on the religious right who have been closely allied with the Republican Party.

In a 19-page document called “An Evangelical Manifesto,” more than 70 theologians, pastors and others said faith and politics have been too closely mixed. They warned against Christians adopting any one political view.”

Here is the list of the steering committee:

Timothy George
Dean, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University

Os Guinness
Author/Social Critic

John Huffman
Pastor, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, CA
Chair, Christianity Today International

Rich Mouw
President, Fuller Theological Seminary

Jesse Miranda
Founder & Director, Miranda Center for Hispanic Leadership, Vanguard University

David Neff
Vice President and Editor in Chief, Christianity Today Media Group

Richard Ohman
Businessman

Larry Ross
President, A. Larry Ross Communications

Dallas Willard
Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California
Author

“James Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, reviewed the document and was invited to sign it, but did not, said Gary Schneeberger, a spokesman for Dobson. Dobson consulted the group’s board of directors — a common practice — and the board agreed he shouldn’t sign “due to myriad concerns about the effort,” Schneeberger said.”

“One of the things that disappointed Dr. Dobson was that when the manifesto was initially circulated, no African-American pastors or theologians were on the invite list,” Schneeberger said. “His thinking was, ‘How can this purport to represent the voice of evangelicals when people so vital to who we are as a movement are excluded from involvement?’” . . .

“Janice Shaw Crouse, director of the Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, said the manifesto was “blurring the distinctions between liberal and conservative” and would confuse Christian voters about the issues that are most important: opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

Jerry Newcombe, a senior producer of the conservative Christian TV show “The Coral Ridge Hour,” said the manifesto creates a “straw man” by portraying some evangelicals as intolerant and seeking to create a theocracy.”

“Separate polls have found that many non-Christians have negative views of today’s Christians, saying they are too judgmental and political.

Our problem is not mislabeling by the press or rebranding because we have a bad image,” said Os Guiness, an evangelical scholar and a drafter of the document, which was released in Washington. “The problem is reality. Much of evangelicalism is not evangelical.”

Interesting. I will probably have more to say about this later.

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12 Responses to “Some Evangelicals Upset about the “Evangelical Manifesto””

Warren on 08 May 2008 at 5:23 pm #

I’m a conservative Evangelical, and I love this manifesto. I just hope people pay attention to it.

It’s interesting that people whose ministries are based on political issues are the people who don’t like it. They’ve got an interest in keeping the Religious Right(tm) in business.
Eric S. Mueller on 08 May 2008 at 5:28 pm #

I’m not upset, but I don’t get the point. I see some names in there that I do respect, and I’m sure everybody involved has their heart in the right place, but I still can’t help but think that the document points out what the writers want evangelicals to believe. Whether I agree with their position or not, I don’t think I’d sign it if I were in a position to, and I’m obviously not.
Chad Winters on 08 May 2008 at 6:44 pm #

Interesting, I tend to agree with the “Manifestoites”, I don’t think the single issue politics guys or those who confuse the gospel with their ideal of an American “Christendom” that never really existed have done much good for evangelism or the spread of the gospel. It too easy to confuse the gospel with the Republican Platform. I think evangelizing would do more good than passing laws, we can’t legislate people into being christians and having christian morals.

Of course, that does not mean we shouldn’t vote our conscience, but we seem to be pretty ugly and angry when there are more non-Christians, than Christians and we get out-voted.

That said, I think it can be as bad on the left side, I can’t support many Democrat ideals.

I think the Manifesto explained the need to equate Christian with Republican.
Warren on 08 May 2008 at 7:49 pm #

But I also think that the Manifesto cautions us against thinking that Republican necessarily equates with Christian. And we also have to realize that Christians are often taken advantage of by the GOP.
Art Thompson on 08 May 2008 at 8:55 pm #

I read Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics Blog on occasion just to see what the Socialists are up to these days. Today I ran across Wallis’ comments on The Evangelical Manifesto and how he had accepted an invitation to be a Charter Signatory.

My first thought was, how appropriate, Jim Wallis and a Manifesto. I read through it twice and then read the accompanying “Study Guide.” No real surprise in any of it if you are familiar with Progressive Christianity: bash Fundamentalists, bash Republicans, and promote Social Justice ad infinitum nasumum.

What was surprising was what I found when I went to the Evangelical Manifesto web site http://www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com/sign.php to see who had signed it. Imagine my surprise to see the names Mark Bailey and Darrell Bock under the Charter Signatories and J. Ed Komoszewski under the Signatories list.

Here then is my two cents on this document.

Jim Wallis and his band of merry men are and have been Socialists from the beginning. Wallis was President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) back in his college days and remains committed to the Socialist Ideology. He is the white equivalent of Jeremiah Wright; a firebrand that uses religion to further their ideology. Wallis likes to call himself an Evangelical but he has a problem with that because Evangelicals are in the public mind Conservatives; culturally and spiritually.

What better way to overcome that problem than redefining Evangelical. So while this undertaking was not attributed to Wallis I see his (and others of his ilk) fingerprints all over it. It saddens me that the three men listed above have somehow been duped into participating in this façade.
Truth Unites... and Divides on 08 May 2008 at 9:34 pm #

If I recall correctly, C. Michael Patton will be going shortly on an apologetics cruise ship with other Christian apologists. One of them will be Gregory Koukl who I think has participated in a Converse with the Scholars session.

Here’s an excerpt from Gregory Koukl’s perspective on an American Christian’s engagement with the political sphere for this year’s election :

“During next year’s presidential election, the one issue that most directly relates to justice is abortion. If you are a Christian, no other question should have more influence in your choice of candidates. Which candidate offers the greatest chance of securing justice for humanity’s most defenseless members, the unborn?

“That’s one-issue voting,” you say. Yes it is, the one issue God is most concerned with when it comes to government. And on the issue of abortion there can be no compromise.”

Read the rest of it at When Compromising Is not a Compromise
watchman on 08 May 2008 at 10:32 pm #

I liked the manifesto as well.

The critical voices sound familiar. what is that sound? Oh, a banging cymbal - loud, annoying, and capable of only one sound.

The fact that the Manifesto portrays “some evangelicals as intolerant and seeking to create a theocracy” is not a problem for me. It sounds like an accurate description of an attention-hogging minority of evangelicalism.

For so long my ministry has been lumped in with the cymbal crowd just because their faces are on Fox News and their voices on the radio. It is about time that there was some delineation made and a recognition that there are other perspectives active in evangelicalism.
Evangelical Manifesto « Third Watch on 08 May 2008 at 10:42 pm #

[...] Click Here - this second perspective is Michael Patton giving a summary of the typical response from Colorado Springs and the swamps of Tennessee (no offense) [...]
KWK on 09 May 2008 at 12:18 am #

TUAD,

Frankly, I’m quite cynical about the Republican efforts on behalf of the unborn. I honestly haven’t seen all that much accomplished in the last 8 years (it remains to be seen what Roberts and Alito will do), and mostly I see Republican politicians trotting this issue out in order to get elected, and then placing it back on the shelf once they are safely ensconced in office.

Further, I think the economic and social policies of Democrats like Bill Clinton (as abhorrent as they were to some free-market capitalists) actually did quite a bit to reduce the demand for abortion by providing more of a social safety net for those in need. Until and unless a majority of America converts to a pro-life stance, the best way I see to mitigate the problem is through economic efforts on behalf of the poor.

So while this issue is certainly worthy of consideration when one is pulling the lever in the voting booth, I don’t know that voting one way or another currently accomplishes quite what you and Mr. Koukl are hoping it does. But that’s just my $0.02.
Truth Unites... and Divides on 09 May 2008 at 11:52 am #

“So while this issue is certainly worthy of consideration when one is pulling the lever in the voting booth, I don’t know that voting one way or another currently accomplishes quite what you and Mr. Koukl are hoping it does.”

The merits of your skepticism are duly noted. However, I should imagine that Wilberforce encountered a great deal of skepticism within the Church of England as he persistently fought the great social justice issue of his time: slavery.
Nick Howard on 12 May 2008 at 5:50 pm #

Fundamentalism began in the early years of the last century as a conservative, pan-Protestant reaction to the Social Gospel and theological liberalism, which were gaining ascendancy in the mainline denominations. A center of this movement was the then conservative, Calvinist Princeton Theological Seminary. Early “fundamentalists” included J. Gresham Machen and B.B. Warfield, who would not be considered fundamentalists in the modern context. By 1950, the term, fundamentalist, became associated with a specific group of conservative Protestants: advocates of “secondary separation” from mainstream culture, rejection of creeds such as the Westminster Confession, and opposition to an intellectual defense of the Christian faith. Most of these fundamentalists were Baptistic, dispensational, and Arminian, and the more militant of them regarded even slight deviation from their positions as being unsaved. “The Evangelical Manifesto” accurately states that “Fundamentalism has become an overlay on the Christian faith and developed into an essentially modern reaction to the modern world.”

Evangelicalism in the American sense developed a distinct identity from fundamentalism in the years immediately following World War II. “The Evangelical Manifesto” places itself in the Protestant spectrum between the liberal “left” and the fundamentalist “right”, a position similar to that of Harold Ockenga and the founders of modern evangelicalism.

“The Evangelical Manifesto” has one statement that could be misleading with regard to the impact of fundamentalists in the social arena.

“Christian Fundamentalism has its counterparts in many religions and even in secularism and often becomes a social movement with a Christian identity but severely diminished Christian content and manner.” Fundamentalism was predominantly apolitical in nature, especially after the failure of Prohibition and the embarrassment of the Scopes trial. It was a movement within the Body of Christ that emphasized personal salvation and evangelism. It had and has certain cultural aspects, such as condemnation of alcohol and tobacco usage, extremely conservative attitudes towards dress and grooming, especially for women, and rejection of all secular entertainment, but it was not a social movement in the sense of wanting to change the direction of society and government overall. The predominant attitude was to reject political involvement as futile, with the analogy of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic often used as an illustration.

Until the administration of Jimmy Carter, a majority of fundamentalists supported Democrats, even liberal ones like FDR and LBJ, on the national scale, an alignment largely related to the mostly Southern, Southwestern, and lower Midwestern geographic base of fundamentalism. In the 1970s, some fundamentalists, such as Jerry Falwell, joined the then newly emerging Christian Right. (Falwell was a close friend of John Rice, the most prolific fundamentalist apologist of the mid-20th Century, though he rarely if ever ventured into political matters.) However, this movement was never primarily a fundamentalist one. Francis Schaeffer, a major inspiration for the Christian Right, was a conservative Calvinist in the tradition of J. Gresham Machen and old Princeton Seminary. Schaeffer parted ways with the leading Presbyterian fundamentalist of his day, Carl McIntyre, several years before he became involved with L’Abri and began advocating political activism. Most of the leaders of the Christian Right, such as Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, and James Dobson, are/were not fundamentalists.

“The Evangelical Manifesto” should have made a stronger case linking the Christian Right and evangelicalism. The Christian Right is an ebbing force in American politics in 2008. Fundamentalism was, however, never a driving force in this movement. The “Christian identity but severely diminished Christian content and manner” of the Christian Right cannot be blamed on fundamentalism, but rather on evangelicalism.
Truth Unites... and Divides on 13 May 2008 at 6:22 pm #

“The “Christian identity but severely diminished Christian content and manner” of the Christian Right cannot be blamed on fundamentalism, but rather on evangelicalism.”

Bart Simpson: “D’Oh!”

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