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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (234240)	5/23/2005 1:33:17 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577901

Guardian This paper seems to be for you what Playboy is for the rest of us....

To: tejek who wrote (234240)	5/23/2005 5:23:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577901

A new breed of evangelicals joins U.S. elite By Laurie Goodstein and David D. Kirkpatrick The New York Times MONDAY, MAY 23, 2005 For a while last winter, Tim Havens, a recent graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who is now an evangelical missionary there, led his morning prayer group in a stairwell of the campus chapel. That was because workers were clattering in to remake the lower floor for a display of American Indian art and a Buddhist student group was chanting in the small sanctuary upstairs. Like most of the Ivy League universities, Brown was founded by Protestant ministers as an expressly Christian college. But over the years it gradually shed its religious affiliation and became a secular institution, as did the others. In addition to Buddhists, the Brown chaplain's office now recognizes "heathen/pagan" as a "faith community." But these days, evangelical students like those in Havens's prayer group are becoming a conspicuous presence at Brown. Of a student body of 5,700, about 400 participate in one of three student groups for Protestants who emphasize the authority of the Bible, the importance of a "born again" conversion experience and the spreading of the faith. Participants in such evangelical groups outnumber active mainline Protestants, the campus chaplain says. And these students are in the vanguard of a larger social shift not just on campuses but also at golf resorts and in boardrooms. They are part of an expanding beachhead of evangelicals in the U.S. elite. The growing power and influence of evangelical Christians is manifest everywhere in the United States, from the best-seller book lists to the White House, but most pollsters agree that the proportion of Americans who identify themselves as white evangelical Christians has stayed steady for decades at about a quarter of the population. What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the past 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. In the process, they have overturned the old social pecking order in which Episcopalian, for example, was a code word for upper class, and fundamentalist or evangelical was shorthand for lower class. Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical chief executives pray together on monthly conference calls and evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street. Their growing wealth and education help explain the new influence of evangelicals in U.S. culture and politics. Their buying power fuels a booming market for Christian books, music and films. Their rising income has paid for construction of huge churches in suburbs across the country. Their charitable contributions finance dozens of mission agencies, religious broadcasters and international service groups. [...] iht.com