April 30, 2018
The recent meeting of evangelical leaders at Wheaton College (read Katelyn Beaty’s excellent discussion of the event on The New Yorker website) was portrayed by the conservative media as nothing but “Trump bashing.” Some who attended beg to differ.
In today’s Link of the Day, Jim Wallis reflects on the meeting and discusses what he believes has transpired in evangelicalism since the creation of the 1973 “Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern,” which was signed by several evangelical leaders of the time, including Wallis and CFT’s late Nancy Hardesty, and marked the beginning of both Evangelicals for Social Action and our own organization.
“A political assault and takeover was successfully executed by the Republican right wing — and the ‘Religious Right’ was born. White evangelicals, in particular, were targeted by a far-right movement steeped in racism and were deliberately politicized. It is now painfully clear that the evangelical world was strategically and politically co-opted — not by more conservative evangelical leaders, but by political operatives from the Republican Party who saw a real opportunity to take over the evangelical world by making particular appeals to ‘conservative social issues.'”
— “From 1970s Chicago to 2018 Wheaton: A Timeline of Evangelical Backsliding” by Jim Wallis writing for Sojourners
Read the article on SoJo.Net by clicking here.
posted by Lē Weaver
