January 10, 2017
Writing for her “Born Again Again” blog in the Christian Century, Carol Howard Merritt says, “It’s difficult to know what will happen to the landscape of American religion after this election.” She points out that some people see the results as being due to bad theology. And she expresses concern that exit polls showed that 81 percent of those who claim the evangelical label “voted for a man who fed off America’s worst misogynistic and racist fears.” As a result, many Christians who once embraced the many positive values of an earlier evangelicalism (before it became increasingly corrupted by right-wing political involvement) now feel betrayed. They feel they no longer fit within the tradition they had once considered their spiritual home, their community of faith. And it hurts deeply. Merritt, herself a former evangelical, provides quotations from other Christian leaders who feel a sense of loss and grief over what has been happening. “Leaving your religious home is so much more complicated than closing one door and opening the next,” she says.
Read “A Time to Heal” by Carol Howard Merritt.
posted by Letha Dawson Scanzoni
