I’ve already Tweeted and Facebooked it, but the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson has an excellent lament on the state of religion in politics – particularly GOP politics – in 2012.
Here are the three key paragraphs, in my estimation:
Though I haven’t noticed much aggressive public praying during this political cycle, Republican expressions of faith have been frequent and frequently crude. By every measure, the quality of evangelical social engagement has been in recent decline.
Candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have practiced a kind of identity politics, urging evangelicals to support one of their own. Then they reduced the evangelical tradition to a pathetic caricature, defined by support for school prayer or (in Bachmann’s case) conspiratorial opposition to vaccines. Their view of Christian social ethics is strangely identical to the most uncompromising anti-government ideology — involving the systematic subordination of a rich tradition of social justice to a narrow and predictable political agenda. It is difficult to imagine Bachmann or Perry in the same political universe as evangelical abolitionists and social reformers William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury.
The problem is not, as some have alleged, a secret theocratic plot. It is the regression of evangelical politicians — and politicians appealing to evangelicals — to the worst habits of the religious right circa 1980. They jostle to claim a divine calling. They appear in the pulpit with pastors who talk ignorantly of America as a “Christian nation.” Some, when they lose, hint darkly of anti-religious persecution. This is the behavior of Jerry Falwell on a bad day. Americans are right to find it discrediting.
Gerson is a frustrating pundit at times, but he’s speaking from within the Evangelical tradition as he laments its decline. In this, he echoes Mark Noll’s 1995 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Perhaps Noll never was able to fan the ember to flame, as he eventually left Wheaton (the Evangelical equivalent of Harvard in many minds) in favor of Notre Dame, though the last I knew he had not swum the Tiber.
Why is American Evangelicalism in such decline? I’m not talking about numbers of people; I’m talking about concurrent faddishness, revolving door church membership and intellectual bankruptcy.
Is this an American thing? Is Evangelicalism elsewhere in the world still producing the likes of Wilberforce or Lord Shaftesbury?
Are American Evangelicals more united in their support of the GOP than they are on doctrinal matters like whether God effectually saves the elect and only the elect or whether He truly offers salvation to all?
I’ve shot off my mouth and keyboard on related topics in the past. This time, I think I’ll just ask the questions and then move on to the rest of my evening.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 