Jesus Politics: The Heroic, Quixotic and Contradictory Evangelicals
Increasingly, U.S. evangelicals have allied themselves with conservative politics. Many rallied around Ronald Reagan, the nation’s first divorced President, who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, while viewing with suspicion Jimmy Carter—a devoutly religious President who taught a Baptist Sunday school class throughout his term in office.
To complicate matters, many evangelicals in places like the United Kingdom and New Zealand align themselves with liberal political parties, believing their Christian commitment enjoins them to seek government help for the poor and to oppose war. And in China, many whom we would identify as evangelical see no contradiction in their support for the world’s largest Communist government
The “adoption” of Reagan as the “admired Christian leader” and the accompanying questioning of Carter is an interesting spectacle and example of the political nature of the conservative evangelical church’s alignment with the Republican party. As the article says, Regan had no “religious trappings” to speak of, and Carter had many of them, and yet, Reagan and Bush get the nod of approval from the Religious Right. I remember how Tony Hall, a committed Christian and longtime advocate for the poor, “scored low” on the Christian Coalition’s scorecard for candidadtes. This is yet another example of the SKEWED sense of “values” proclaimed by the Religious Right.