Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 October 2008 09:15:13
Looking down the Guardian front page this morning I groaned to myself when I say the headline saying, Evangelicals Ponder Prospect of Obama and then clicked onto the article entitled "Evangelicals start soul-searching as prospect of Obama win risks Christian gains in politics". Yet again the E word is being used as is if it is automatically belongs to the Republican right and a picture is being painted in the mind of the reader about what an evangelical is.
Having read some of the progressive evangelical work coming out of America from people like Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren it's obviously not that simple. Whilst the article made brief reference to the wider concerns that are now being looked at by evangelical Christians in the States, (and which Wallis' latest book The Great Awakening addresses) it doesn't recognise that this means that evangelicals are now thinking more about which way to vote.
This 2006 article in Christianity Today, by George G. Hunter III explains, from an American perspective what I think the Guardian article is trying to get across. However, the fact it was written in 2006 shows how this change of thinking is not a sudden thing and cannot be related to Obama, rather it represents a shift in American thinking generally which has been happening over the last few years.
For an insightful, and interesting article exploring this in relation to the current election, from a US progressive evangelical perspective I'd recommend Jim Rice and Jeannie Choi'S article in Sojourners. This article explains how age is also an important variable here and how wider questions are now being asked in terms of what it means to be "pro-life".
Then, just as in the UK, we need to recognise that there are faith based groups within all the parties, not just the Republican Party. There are Democrats who are also evangelicals; the two are not mutually exclusive. Matthew 25 is a faith based campaigning group which is endorsing the Democratic campaign. It describes itself as a group who are "Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal and Evangelical", again this reflects changes in thinking which are occuring due to Christian becoming, again, the key identifier - although the sub-cultural self-identification is still occuring.
In the UK, I think, we can sometimes fall into the trap that the Guardian has of still holding onto old ideas about American evangelicalism and creating a stereotype. Hopefully, a bit of intelligent reading around the subject in the run up to the elections will help educate us on the wider picture.