President Obama has taken a positive step in continuing support for faith-based social service initiatives. This position has drawn criticism from secular fundamentalists on the left but earned praise from the center and right. While Obama may continue to differ with evangelical Christians on some social issues, he clearly appreciates the positive role that faith communities can play in creating a more compassionate and decent society.
Jury still out on Obama, evangelicals
By Rick Cousins
Contributor
Galveston Daily News
Published February 7, 2009
Texas is almost always red on color-coded political maps.
Red, that is, in the sense of conservative, Republican-by-plurality, and a part of the remaining Bible Belt. A whole different country. An exotic place, politically separate from both liberal coasts.
As ReligionLink.org notes, evangelicals in general and in Texas in particular are largely not favored territory for liberal leanings. Regarding the new president, it noted that “Pew exit polls show that Obama’s gains among white Protestants amounted to a mere 2 percentage points over John Kerry in 2004.”
Does Obama’s election then leave evangelicals, those Protestant Christians who are generally characterized by conservative, “born-again theology” and a zeal to evangelize, abandoned on the Capitol steps with little hope of influence for the foreseeable future?
To find out, Our Faith consulted with Rice University professor D. Michael Lindsay. The sociologist and author spent the last three years researching and interviewing exactly 360 informed evangelicals, plus other movers, shakers and pundits across the nation.
In pursuit of the foundations of the religious right, he cornered and polled a wide spectrum of observers such as James A. Baker III, George H.W. Bush, Charles Colson, Os Guinness, Ted Haggard, Cal Thomas, Kathie Lee Gifford and Art Linkletter, with a sprinkling of sports stars including NFL coaches and players and corporate CEOs for good measure.
“Evangelical public leaders have brought their faith convictions to bear in their respective spheres of influences,” Lindsay writes in his resulting new book, “Faith in the Halls of Power.”
“History will be the judge of whether this contributes to a more enlightened democracy, where engaged citizens use their faith to serve the common good or whether we have merely witnessed the triumph of another interest group with a distinctive vision for society.”
The work traces the sometime deliberate, sometime haphazard and occasionally serendipitous construction of the modern religious right.
If the incoming president is being received tentatively in conservative religious quarters, the outgoing one had his own problems with them.
As far back as 2005, an Associated Press story noted, “Evangelicals, Republican women, Southerners and other critical groups in President Bush’s political coalition are worried about the direction the nation is headed and disappointed with his performance.”
Surprisingly, sociologist Lindsay credits Clinton, not Bush, with the most important advances evangelicals have had in the political arena.
“Evangelicals actually have seen their greatest policy advantages when ‘their man’ was not in the White House,” Lindsay told Our Faith. He credited Clinton with implementing the most sweeping changes in church-state relations in 40 years.
“Clinton signed the executive order that allowed broad freedom to talk about your faith or post a Bible verse in the (federal) work place,” he said.
Will Obama match Clinton in implementing faith-friendly policies or is he more likely to scrap the accomplishments of the evangelical cause that Lindsay documents? While the jury is still out, Lindsay suggests the new president may seek a peace of sorts with those who are less liberal, in all areas, than he is.
“Evangelicals may not feel like they are in political power these days,” Lindsay said. “Barack Obama is in many ways a different kind of Democrat. I do not remember a Democrat since Carter who was so willing to talk publicly about his faith and for his faith to affect his policy issues.”
Although Lindsay suggests that evangelicals may initially find little in common with Obama, he also asserts that Obama’s openness may at least grant them a hearing when relevant policy discussions arise.
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren, who led the prayer at the Inauguration, may be the evangelicals’ successor to Billy Graham — practicing a more “elastic orthodoxy,” as Lindsay characterizes him.
“Warren is the face of the next generation of American evangelicalism,” he said.
http://galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=f4cba139963e5167
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