NEW YORK (ABP) — As President Bush prepares to deliver his final State of the Union address Jan. 28, evangelical and Catholic leaders are calling for him to use that speech to “salvage his moral legacy.”
David Gushee told reporters on a Jan. 24 conference call that evangelicals have yet to fully sort out the legacy of “an explicitly evangelical president who sadly has had such a truncated vision of what moral leadership looks like.
“I am hopeful that the evangelical community as a whole has been chastened by that and is open to reconsidering what we think truly evangelical leadership looks like,” said Gushee, a professor at Mercer University and head of Evangelicals for Human Rights. “It's just not enough to articulate opposition to abortion or gay marriage … that does not constitute a broad moral vision or adequately represent what evangelical Christians believe.”
Gushee, who wrote the anti-torture statement recently endorsed by the National Association of Evangelicals (and who writes a regular column for Associated Baptist Press), joined four other religious leaders for the call. It was sponsored by Faith in Public life, a non-partisan resource center for faith leaders working on social issues.
They urged Bush to end the war in Iraq, eliminate the so-called “marriage penalty” on federal income taxes, work to provide health care and housing the American poor, and apologize for and prohibit aggressive questioning techniques in the war on terror, such as the infamous “waterboarding” procedure.
With Bush in his final year as president, the time for him to act is now, they said.
“The bad news is that the evangelical world has been hurt badly and compromised badly by its identification with President Bush's immoral choices,” said Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action. He said Bush has been “marginally successful” in work against global poverty and has established effective HIV/AIDS programs. But, he added, that work should be expanded by leading America's fellow wealthy nations to increase the aid they provide to poor nations.
“In terms of foreign policy, [Bush] has an opportunity in the whole Israeli-Palestinian peace discussion to impact a marvelously important legacy there,” Sider said. “The president needs to do more to make it clear that this is one of his top priorities…. It certainly won't happen unless he pushes both sides very hard, and if it does happen, it will be extremely important in the history of the world and to his legacy.”
Meanwhile, Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, called the amount of Americans living below the poverty line a “moral and social crisis.” And while certain behaviors can lead people into poverty, the state of the economy is the bigger culprit, he said.
In 2002, 42 percent of the people served by Catholic agencies lived below the poverty line. The number increased to 52 percent of the 8 million people the agency helped in 2006, he said.
Paul de Vries, a board member for the National Association of Evangelicals, was an original signer of the Evangelical Climate Initiative statement, a 2006 letter signed by 86 evangelical leaders calling for federal legislation to require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through market-based mechanisms. De Vries told reporters that Bush should use his address to outline a commitment to do everything possible to reduce global warming and invest in sources of renewable energy.
An attention to climate change is “unavoidable” for anyone who pays attention to Scripture, de Vries said. “The issues of climate change are so crucial to all of us. We need to act because the world knows there's a great need for leadership here, and if we're not the leaders, it's difficult to know who would take that leadership.”
Anne Curtis, who returned Jan. 20 from visiting Iraqi refugees in the Middle East, also urged President Bush to obey a “moral obligation” to end the war in Iraq and fund humanitarian assistance in the area.
Curtis, a Catholic nun, is on the leadership team of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy in Silver Spring, Md. The presence of Catholics on the panel is indicative, the leaders said, of a new wave of cooperation between Catholics and evangelicals on a broader range of social issues than abortion and homosexuality.
There's more momentum than ever for Catholics and evangelicals to join in a commitment to human dignity in every area of life, and Bush's State of the Union address has the potential to take a step in the right direction, Gushee added.
“Maybe we'll never have to go back to a time when people in large sectors of the evangelical community can be persuaded that we have a complete vision just because [politicians] have certain articulated stances on a couple of issues.”
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