WASHINGTON (ABP) — Several prominent conservative Christian leaders, in a joint statement to be unveiled May 7, are rebuking their fellow American evangelicals for allowing secular politics to co-opt their faith.
“An Evangelical Manifesto,” set to be released at a Washington press conference, reportedly criticizes evangelicals for allowing the religious label to become synonymous with conservative politics.
The Associated Press, which attained a draft of the statement in advance of the announcement, reported May 2 that the manifesto is “starkly self-critical” of the evangelical movement for focusing on secular politics to the detriment of the gospel proclamation that is at the core of evangelicalism.
“That way faith loses its independence, Christians become ‘useful idiots' for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology,” the statement, according to the AP, says.
Press materials said the manifesto “seeks to clarify the confusions and corruptions surrounding the term ‘evangelical' that have grown so deep that the character of what it means has been obscured and its importance lost.”
The statement was spearheaded by popular evangelical author Os Guinness. Among its more than 80 initial signatories are Richard Muow, president of Fuller Theological Seminary; and David Neff, editor of Christianity Today.
It criticizes evangelicals at both ends of the political spectrum for getting so heavily involved in fighting over culture-war issues — such as abortion rights and gay rights — that they have earned evangelicals the reputation of being little more than a political special-interest group. The document is clearly aimed at the most politically active evangelical conservatives, however.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the most prominent Religious Right activists have not signed on to the document. According to news reports, its signers don't include figures like Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council or Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
The document is the latest evidence of an increasingly apparent division within American evangelicalism between emerging leaders and many in the old guard of the movement. Younger leaders — and some of their older allies — have lamented the increasingly strong identification of the evangelical tradition with the Republican Party's conservative wing. Many of them also have encouraged evangelical leaders to move away from a focus on fighting legalized abortion and gay rights without a similarly intense focus on issues like protecting the environment, fighting global AIDS and poverty and supporting international religious freedom and other human rights.
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