I missed this in all the flurry of post-election hand-wringing and recriminations by the Republicans and gloating and megalomania by the Democrats. Get ready to be shocked...are you ready? Christians aren't interested in a theocracy! Can you believe it? I was so shocked when I read this that I had to check to make sure that the address was really the Washington Post website and not a hoax. You have to read the whole thing because it's so surprising. I can't believe they printed the truth (and this is the second time in a week, amazing):
It was in 1976 -- the "year of the evangelical," according to Newsweek -- that conservative Christians burst upon the political landscape. Critics have been warning about the theocratic takeover of America ever since. Thus the plaintive cry of a Cabinet member in the Carter administration: "I am beginning to fear that we could have an Ayatollah Khomeini in this country, but that he will not have a beard . . . he will have a television program."(via)
This election season produced similar lamentations -- Howard Dean's warning about Christian "extremism," Kevin Phillips's catalogue of fears in "American Theocracy" and brooding documentaries such as "Jesus Camp," to name a few. This theme is a gross caricature of the 100 million or more people who could be called evangelicals. But the real problem is that it denies the profoundly democratic ideals of Protestant Christianity, while ignoring evangelicalism's deepening social conscience.
Evangelicals led the grass-roots campaigns for religious liberty, the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage. Even the Moral Majority in its most belligerent form amounted to nothing more terrifying than churchgoers flocking peacefully to the polls on Election Day. The only people who want a biblical theocracy in America are completely outside the evangelical mainstream, their influence negligible.
And not only are we not bent on taking over the country and forcing our God down the throats of the atheists and threatening them with stoning if they don't believe but we also help the poor! Shocking! Can you believe that Christians are actually helping the poor:
It is surely no thirst for theocracy but rather a love for their neighbor that sends American evangelicals into harm's way: into refugee camps in Sudan; into AIDS clinics in Somalia, South Africa and Uganda; into brothels to help women forced into sexual slavery; and into prisons and courts to advocate for the victims of political and religious repression.So, it's there in print in the MSM, so it must be true because they have editors and fact checkers and they wouldn't print it if we were interested in a theocracy.
Indeed, probably no other religious community in the United States is more connected to the poverty and suffering of people in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations argues that evangelicals offer moral ballast to American foreign policy. "[E]vangelicals who began by opposing Sudanese violence and slave raids against Christians in southern Sudan," he wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, "have gone on to broaden the coalition working to protect Muslims in Darfur."
We really aren't interested in a theocracy and forced conversions. You can't bring in the kingdom of God by the power of the sword, it can only be by the power of the Holy Spirit. It's a work of God, not man. We can only proclaim, but He converts.
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