I am thankful for my old friend Steve Knight, who initially launched me into the blogosphere, for bringing to my attention the working draft of
“Evangelical Call to Civic Responsiblity”. I’ve commented some at his blog on specific policy-issues(gay-marriages, abortion) at his blog. Now, I am going to focus in the commentary below on the political concepts in the document. To this end, I took extensive notes on the original document and then wrote the below based on my notes. It doesn’t deal with everything in order and sometimes I rewrote stuff in my own words. As such, it may not be crystal clear what exactly I was referring to at every point.

I believe it is a good thing that they are writing and publicizing this, since it will get debate going and help lead to changes in the voting habits of “evangelicals”. I particularly like the stress on the importance of Christians developing better habits of political deliberation. It is important to remember that past great Christian thinkers inspired us to creative engagement in policy prescription, not agreement on what political changes should be made.

I myself in my Christian Pragmatic Progressive Party(CPPP) platform wrote the following…
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Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror

The book is scheduled to come out on July 4th.

The author argues that “the West is losing the war against al-Qaeda and that an ‘avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked’ war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden’s hands.” According to the author, Osama Bin Laden is not on the run and regime-change in Iraq has not made the US safer.

The most profound/controversial statement the author makes is that Osama Bin Laden may be preparing an attack in the US timed before the elections with the intention of helping Bush stay president, since “they can’t have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president.”

The article states that Peter Bergen,the author of two books on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who also has read the book:”His views represent an amped-up version of what is emerging as a consensus among intelligence counter-terrorist professionals.”

I had a conservative friend react to me passing along this book by dismissing it as liberal propaganda, but I can’t see an anti-terrorism intelligence official really being part of liberal propaganda.

IMO, the Republicans should start thinking about sending Bush back to Texas and nominate John McCain as their candidate for the upcoming election. It is better to relatively easily lock in the presidency for their party for 8 years(If the war on terrorism gets worse then it is unlikely a new incumbent in 2008 will be replaced.) and put up with McCain’s idiosyncrasies than dice it with the BushAdmin.

dlw

For Iraq Shiites, Faith knows no boundaries

The influence of shiite Sadr is unlikely to be undercut by supporting shiite “moderate” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The reason is that there is a solidarity of sorts among shiites and Sadr has a staying power on account of the fact that his father was a prominent recent shiite martyr under Saddam’s regime. Martyrdom confers much stature among shiites, since they trace their roots back to 661, when the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali was killed in a power-struggle after Muhammed’s death.

There is going to be an important relationship between mosque and state in Iraq, one way or the other. How the US may go about ensuring some autonomy of state from mosque to help the state adjudicate fairly the differences between the many different religious/ethnic groups in Iraq is going to require more knowledge and a sense of Iraq’s history than the neo-conservatives in the BushAdmin have been willing to learn up to this point.

dlw

Politicians Face Censure From Bishops on Abortion Rights

A lot of people have written on this issue already, but when I write about it, one point keeps coming up over and over again:Since when has the ecclesiastical leadership of the Roman Catholic Church been infallible wrt the relationship between Church and State? That is what is at stake here, the extent a religious minority can determine the laws of the state against the will of the majority.

I have no problems with the RCC mandating that its members hold that abortion is a sin and due to the sinful state of our world, but we’re talking about political strategy here and studying at Catholic divinity school doesn’t persay prepare one for understanding the nuances of strategy(And neither does getting one’s PhD in Economics for that matter.). But it is necessary to understand the nuances to predict more of the consequences of different possible strategies and one has to understand the consequence of different actions to judge what is right conduct, ultimately.

There is no way that elective abortions in the first trimester are going to become illegal again and stay illegal. Not too long ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the Portugal experience, where abortion was made illegal and then remade legal because of the bad publicity surrounding the punishments given for having abortions.

It would be much wiser to try to set it up so we can redefine when human personhood begins by virtue of a national referendum, requiring a 75% super-majority. This would permit change and ensure pro-choicers that the changes will not be drastic and that a majority of females will be willing to accept the changes. That reduces their political opposition. And then, we can work on a wide variety of other stuff geared at trying to discourage abortions and other measures that will save born human lives, particularly those in the under-developed world where there is much that could be done in this regard.

dlw

Today’s article in the NYTIMES describes how thanks to the leadership of Ralph Reed that the Bush Administration is calling on many Southern Baptist preachers to do whatever they can without losing their tax-exempt status to support the president’s re-election, which includes a great deal of voter-registration of their congregations.

Jack Graham, the president of the Southern Baptists, says, “he believed the Bible called on Christians to support godly politicians.” Now “godly politicians” is quite likely to be an oxy-moron. But his remark abstracts from how, willy-nilly, his participation in the event reflected his leadership of one of the largest christian denominations in the US. It is a strong violation of the principal of the separation(read autonomy) of Church and State for an ecclesiastical leader to publicly throw his support for a particular political leader.

To vote values is not a bad thing. It is something that should be encouraged, but at stake here is more how many issues take on a significance for people that is well beyond the concrete political changes that might be made. What is at fault here is that people are not being encouraged to deliberate on political issues, questioning the way they are framed and weighing the different issues before making their decision.

They are presumed to be “conservative” and so all the republican party needs to do is to get them to register to vote and out to vote so they can tip the election in several key states.

Also as someone who is mostly in the tradition of Swedish-Baptist-Pietism, I firmly believe the pastor is s’posed to be someone who is a specialist in the study and teaching of scripture and Christian tradition. The pastor shouldn’t persay have more weight in directing how a church should act than any other member and the Southern Baptist Church seems to be violating this precept to the extreme.

By all means let pastors/deacons/elders encourage following/deliberating/debating/acting wrt politics, but let them not claim that they have any greater access to what is right than anyone else in the final political strategic decisions made.

dlw

Get Connected

I’ve posted there twice and hope to get some feedback on my ideas about recasting the abortion debate in more neutral terms as concerning the legal redefinition of when human personhood begins and working out the meanings of elective vs. non-elective abortions.

dlw

BBC article on Bush’s adamancy in the face of the 9-11 counsel’s findings

Apparently, both sides agree there were contacts between the two groups, but the 9-11 counsel has concluded that there was no evidence that it led to any kind of working relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

This ought to have serious consequences for the BushAdmin.

Lee Hamilton:We’re quite sure on the basis of the evidence we have that there was not an operational tie between Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government on the one hand and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida on the other with regard to attacks on the United States.

dlw

US Christian Ad stands by Iraqis

A Christian organisation in the US has prepared an advertisement for Arab TV condemning the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail.

dlw:We should have more of these and we should also show the arab/muslim world the power of democracy.

I was thinking that Christian groups in the US could form an alliance with Muslim groups to: 1. put restrictions/taxes on the advertisement of alcohol. 2. create a progressive tax on the advertisement of movies to reduce Hollywood’s ability to propagandize the entire world with its movies. 3. Ensure that USMuslims have direct say-so on US middle-east policy for the future. 4. find ways to discourage pornography through taxation. 5. Discourage drug-use and encourage teens to practice abstinence.

I think a political alliance that would give USMuslims more sway over the policies of the US gov’t would send the right signal to the muslim world that democracy works and that the US is not the great Satan. Its just a country governed by sinners who often don’t take into account the full consequences of their actions, especially for people in other countries that can’t vote for their reelection.

dlw

Unfit to Print?

The above is a wonderful expose of how major USAmerican newspapers, particularly the NYTIMES, has evinced a longstanding pattern of not reporting news that would make the US look bad or diminish the credibility of the BushAdmin’s argument for immediate regime-change in Iraq.

It would strike me as a likely consequence of the increased concentration of newspaper reporting with the internet and the poisoning of democracy in the US from the flagrations of the cultural wars that the autonomy of the press from the state would be in risk of being atrophied.

dlw

As mentioned before, Gary Dorrien has the distinction of being the only non-evangelical to ever do a history of evangelical theology. In his introduction, he gives as his favorite def’n of an evangelical as, “anyone who likes Billy Graham”. He then offers three ideal-types for types of evangelicals.

Here’s some paragraphs from the introduction(p.10) to his book, “The Remaking of Evangelical Theology” that describes the differences well.

I argue that this process of delineating clear, substantive differences from fundamentalism is occurring today in evangelical theology, though not without strong resistance from the fundamentalist evangelical establishment. The most appropriate definition of fundamentalism still focuses on its commitment to a list of literally interpreted “fundamental” doctrines that are founded on a doctrine of precise biblical inerrancy. Fundamentalism contains a narrow range of debates about the degree to which precise factual accuracy of either the original scriptural “autographs” (the biblical books in their first form) or the received text must be affirmed, but in all cases, the fundamentalist position is defined by its insistence that at least the scriptural autographs contained no errors of any kind. Fundamentalists at the liberal edge of their tradition maintain that the attribution of errorlessness refers only to authorial intention (recognizing that “error” holds different meanings in different literary forms), but most fundamentalists hold out for a more literal and univocally precise understanding of inerrancy.
For the half past century, most of the evangelical movement has remained theologically fundamentalist in this foundational sense of the term. In recent years, however, mainstream evangelical theology has begun to show signs of becoming not only different in degree or style from fundamentalism but also different in kind. Regarding the nature and authority of scripture, many evangelical thinkers have moved to some form of “infallible teaching” model, in which scripture is held to be infallible only in the affirmation of its message. This infallible message is variously construed as all matters of faith and practice, or all matters pertaining to salvation, or the overall message of scripture, or the essential message of scripture. I call this infallible-teaching model of scriptural authority the neoevangelical position, while bearing in mind that this “new” model has deep roots in the Reformationist and Pietist traditions. In the context of modern evangelicalism, the neoevangelical model stands as a variable mediating position between the neoorthodox and regnant fundamentalist models. In speaking of neoorthodoxy as a position at the left edge of the modern evangelical continuum, I define this position primarily as a theological perspective in which scripture is regarded not as revelation itself but as a witness to revelation that can become the Word of God through the movement of God’s Spirit. In each case, therefore, I distinguish fundamentalist evangelicalism, infallible-teaching neoevangelicalism, and neoorthodox evangelicalism primarily by the ways in which these models differently address the question of the nature of scriptural inspiration and authority.

ps, in case people don’t know. I’m a bit of a cross between neoevangelical and neo-orthodox evangelical. I’m probably more of a neoorthodox now than neoevangelical, but I’ve been blessed in life to have been in all three camps over the course of my life.

dlw

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