Religious Right: Pulling back from politics?

last updated 8 January 2015

Evangelical Christians are “pulling back from the fray,” said Neil King Jr. in The Wall Street Journal. After three decades of intense political activism, the Christian Right is conceding that it has lost its battle to roll back the sexual revolution, and that its strident condemnation of homosexuality and premarital sex is driving away large numbers of younger Christians. Russell Moore, the 42-year-old public voice of the Southern Baptist Convention, is now warning Christians to avoid becoming “mascots for any political faction” and advising a “kind and empathetic” message. When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in June, Moore’s message to his organization’s 45,000 member churches was, “Love your gay and lesbian neighbors.” What an incredible turnabout, said Andrew Sullivan in Dish.AndrewSullivan.com. Today, most Christians under 40 no longer find the old hard-liners’ positions on sex education, contraception, and marriage equality “even vaguely plausible, let alone humane.”

“If the killing of unborn children and the spreading of sham marriage doesn’t qualify as an urgent reason for Christians to participate in politics,” said George Neumayr in Spectator.org, what does? Moore’s message seems to be, “Backward, Christian soldiers.” A true religious leader would not consult polls to find out “whether or not to protect the unborn and God’s plan for marriage.” Such frustration is understandable, said Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, but the reality we Christians must face is that our old strategy of condemnation and confrontation has failed. So evangelicals have a choice: Neumayr’s “angry nostalgia for a time when our side seemed to be winning battles,” or Moore’s “strategic engagement with the world” as it is today.

The word “strategic” doesn’t mean surrender, said Abby Ohlheiser in TheAtlantic.com. If you look at Moore’s statements carefully, he isn’t asking Christians to give up on activism; he’s asking them to promote their beliefs in a more “PR-friendly” way. Take the pro-life movement. It has attracted many young Christians, who promote adoption, counsel pregnant women to carry to term, and warn that abortion will scar them emotionally—all the while pushing for “the same controversial laws restricting women’s access to abortion.” To see the white flag of surrender in the Religious Right’s change of tone “merely indicates the power of progressive wishful thinking.”