Minnesota Evangelical disowns right wing

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Mad Latinist/Justin sent me a link to this NYT story, which describes an evangelical megachurch preacher in Maplewood, MN who has explicitly disavowed right-wing Republican politics. Sullivan links to the article as an example of Christian backlash against Christianism. Just as I am happy to see the conservative movement breaking up over neoconservative radicalism, I'm happy to see the evangelical movement break up over theocratic radicalism. For too long, evangelicals have been used as cannon fodder in the "culture wars", and I'm glad some of them who aren't interested in that role are speaking up.

I'm not as optimistic as Sullivan that this movement is growing. I've heard little stories here and there, but I'm waiting for some big, national political fight where non-Christianist evangelicals make a visible impact. And I'm not sure how many evangelicals are actually theocrats at heart and how many aren't. But I do hope we hear more and more of this kind of evangelical rebellion against Republican politics.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The discouraging thing about that article was that 1) the megachurch in question was in Minnesota, a world away from the yahoo nests of the Bible Belt, and 2) the minister lost about 20% of his congregation by not equating Christianity with the Republican Party. What the article mainly reveals is the continuing decline of the NY Times -- an anecdote does not a trend make, even if your deadlines are tight.
-- sglover
10:17 AM, July 31, 2006
Zachary Drake said…
Thanks for stopping by once again sglover. Yes, this is just anecdotal evidence, which is fine if it's used to illustrate statistical data. But standing alone it isn't that useful in determining whether this is a real trend or not.

It is sad the he lost 20% of his congregation, but it would be interesting to check back in a few months to see if he's picked up more members because of his stance (and the publicity from being on the front page of the NY Times).
11:35 AM, July 31, 2006
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