This is the political world you are growing up in..

Newsweek Tells Evangelicals What to Do
by Don Feder

After decades of excoriating evangelical Christians as bigoted morons, foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics and vile hypocrites -- both sexually-obsessed and sexually-repressed (part Elmer Gantry, part Elmer Fudd) -- the media have hit on a new tactic.

The cover story (“America’s God Complex – Like George W. Bush, The Religious Right Is At The Crossroads”) in the Nov. 13 Newsweek explains that evangelicals aren’t really that bad – it’s just that the poor fools have been duped by the Republican Party, their energies (which should be devoted to more worthwhile endeavors) diverted to sordid politics.

But there’s hope that the Bible Belt will come to its senses and abandon Values Voter activism for bake sales – Newsweek discloses.

The publication contrasts such movement icons as Focus on The Family’s Dr. James Dobson, with a reputed new breed of evangelical leaders.

One of these young Turks, Adam Hamilton, tells the members of his Leawood, Kansas church, “Our task is not to go around judging people – Jesus didn’t do that.” Apparently, Pastor Hamilton missed the incident with the woman accused of adultery, described in the Gospel of John. Jesus saved her from stoning, then told her to “Go and sin no more.” Sin no more? – rather judgmental, wouldn’t you say?

Leaders like Dobson, Falwell and Robertson have “lost their focus on the spirit of Jesus and have separated the world into black and white,” Hamilton declares. “I can’t see Jesus standing with signs at an anti-gay rally.”

Nor can one picture Jesus standing with a sign at a pro-life demonstration, an anti-pornography rally or a rally against global warming.

There weren’t many leather bars in Jesus’ day. In 1st century Judea, “gay rights” was a non-issue. There also weren’t rallies against child sacrifice or ritual prostitution – which the Bible puts in the same category as conduct of the San Fran persuasion.
By the way, only Newsweek could compare a Kansas pastor nobody has ever heard of with a radio psychologist whose voice reaches an estimated 220 million worldwide, as if they represented contending currents within the evangelical movement.

But the (quote, unquote) news magazine moves doggedly forward with its thesis. The “new generation of evangelical believers” is “pressing beyond the religious right of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, trying to broaden the movement’s focus from the familiar wars about sex to include issues of social and economic justice.”

Feed the homeless and shelter the hungry? Now that’s the stuff! Newsweek doesn’t understand that it’s not a choice of caring for the needy or fighting to save marriage and stop the slaughter in the womb. All are integral aspects of the same ethic.

Since their political awakening in the mid-1970s, while evangelicals worked to end the scourge of abortion and stay the steady march of social decay (the Sodomizing of American culture), they have simultaneously raised billions to fight famine in Africa, build homes for the poor, rehabilitate addicts and provide aid to the most destitute among us.

The religious right’s crusade to save the family -- opposition to abortion and so-called same-sex marriage -- might itself be seen as charity. The family is the first and most important social welfare agency.

Functional families raise children who won’t end up living on the streets or pregnant and on welfare at age 16. If the left succeeds at destroying the American family, there will be homeless shelters, soup kitchens and rehab centers as far as they eye can see – assuming there’s anyone left to man them.

Still, Newsweek rhetorically asks if conservative Christians can “move beyond the apparent confines of the religious right as popularly understood, or are they destined to seem harsh and intolerant – the opposite of what their own faith would have them be?” And, if the latter, will they still beat their wives with worn-out cliches?

According to Newsweek, evangelicals can continue their obsession with abortion and homosexuality, their “God complex” (and thus “seem harsh and intolerant”) or repent and adopt an agenda more pleasing to the media elite – “social and economic justice,” the Gospel of Gore.

There’s a major flaw in this line of reasoning: Even if evangelicals are prepared to leave politics alone, politics won’t leave them alone.

The left is on a mission against God. It correctly perceives Christianity (more broadly, the Judeo-Christian ethic) as the principal obstacle to the attainment of its utopian vision. Thus, it is determined to stigmatize, marginalize and ghettoize Christians – to increasingly circumscribe their influence and to confine their values to a designated building on a chosen day of the week.