GroshLink

Conservative Christians (like me) were promised that having an evangelical like Mr. Bush in office was a dream come true. Well, it wasn't. Not by a long shot. The administration accomplished little that evangelicals really cared about. -- David Kuo, the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001 to 2003 and author of "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." Take a moment to read his NY Times piece.

There is no doubt that evangelical politics have affected our ability to have conversations regarding the Gospel in the campus environment. Some of the blame falls on the political activism, some falls upon the despisers of the faith (see quote from Christian Smith's insightful Social Science, Ideology, and American Evangelicals: Who's really "anti-science"? below), and some falls on the offensive and absurd (from a human perspective) nature of the Gospel.

Yesterday, in another context, I was having the conversation regarding how followers of Christ engage in transforming our culture without being transformed by it. How do we guard against fighting evil with evil? How do we communicate the love of Christ in our word, lives, and political activism? It's messy because we live in a messy and fallen world and we ourselves are messy/fallen/broken (even me). I have more to say, but its been a full day with the basement floor being poured and cared for in the pouring rain . . . a story to be shared with grandkids again and again :-)

Indeed, it appears that those who want to dislike and misrepresent fundamentalists and evangelicals are simply proceeding as if this body of published research does not exist. Their attitude seems roughly to resemble that expressed by President George Bush, Sr., early in his presidency, about crimes committed in the Iran-Contra affair: "I don't care what the facts are, I will never apologize for the United States." The facts be damned—full speed ahead with what we already know. And what we surely already know about conservative Protestants is that they are deplorable and dismissible because, among other reasons, they won't pay attention to the authority of scientific facts. Now, I am aware that sociology doesn't have quite the scientific prestige of biology and cosmology. But I also know that Greeley and Hout are at least as smart and analytically capable as, say, Dawkins and Dennett. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove on conservative Protestants, ideology and prejudice seem to win out over social scientifically discovered facts—precisely in order to sustain the charges of evangelicals' anti-scientific obscurantism. Go figure. Was it St. Augustine who taught that the human will is more powerful than the human mind?