A small piece of my recent Franz Lecture at Gordon College:
Despite all of the obituaries written about the death of the Christian Right, the “culture wars that were born in the 1980s are still raging. Too many self-professed followers of Jesus in the United States today embrace an unhealthy blend of religion and politics that hurts the witness of the church and further polarizes the nation into warring camps. The old saying that the evangelical movement in America has become the “Republican Party at prayer” seems to have been confirmed again in November 2016 when 81% of evangelical voters pulled the lever for the GOP candidate for President.
Too often evangelical engagement in politics is understood in terms of “reclaiming” America or restoring America to its Christian roots. Evangelicals have never had a robust vision for how to live together with our differences. We have never been very good at pluralism because we have always held, to one degree or another, a position of cultural power.
Evangelicals don’t know what they believe. Remember women submissiveness, divorce. They voted for who for president!!!
I lament the fact that I have a number of relatives who seem to believe God has called them to unite believers against abortion issue, particularly on Facebook, and see no problem on the next immediate post tout political support for current administrative positions that compromise practice of the beatitudes!