Numbers game |
by Gina Dalfonzo |
The "recovering evangelical" speaking in this video interview strikes me as looking at religion and politics with an oddly utilitarian slant. Since when are Christians supposed to play the numbers with human lives -- and where does this fascination with the number of references to a topic in the Bible come from, anyway? (Yes, that's a rhetorical question; I know very well where at least some of it is coming from.)
If a "non-recovering evangelical" insisted, for instance, that we should pay more attention to following Old Testament dietary laws than preserving the environment because of the respective number of biblical references to each topic, he or she would be laughed off the national stage, and rightly so. And the same would happen if he or she tried to prove that the two goals were mutually exclusive. (Also, I'm not entirely sure why someone who thinks evangelicalism is something that you recover from is speaking for evangelicals.)
No one has yet explained to me, in any way that makes sense, the liberal Christian philosophy that you save more lives by taking away the right to life. As long as "recovering evangelicals" keep trying to apply the term Christian to a belief that actually harks back to paganism, I don't expect that anyone will.
His whole argument is bogus because evangelical Christians ARE concerned with more than the two issues (abortion and gay marriage) he mentions. We DO care about the poor, about sexual trafficking, about AIDS, etc.: I dare say that it's evangelical Christians (and Christian organizations) who are doing more about addressing these issues than liberals, whether Christian or not. We tend to put our money (and our hearts, hands, and feet) where our mouth is.
Posted by: Diane Singer | January 06, 2009 at 07:27 PM