Adding Values
Rank and file evangelicals aren't moving left or right.
BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
Friday, October 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
"Values are insubstantial stuff, existing primarily in the imagination," Allan Bloom wrote in "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987). During the Cold War, the language of "values"--in which beliefs about good and evil are deemed purely subjective--worked well for relativists and, not least, peaceniks, as Mr. Bloom explained. If the U.S. and the Soviet Union merely had different "values," there was no real need for confrontation.
Such language now appears to be serving the same purpose in the culture war. After polling suggested that people who voted on the basis of "values" were key to President Bush's 2004 re-election, members of what used to be known unambiguously as the Religious Right took to calling themselves "values voters." The cultural left has understood this language shift as a sign that maybe we can all be friends.
Two weeks ago, Third Way, a self-described "strategy center for progressives," released a document called "Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values Between Evangelicals and Progressives." It amounted to a broad statement of principle signed by folks like Joel Hunter, a Florida mega-church pastor, David Gushee, a Christianity Today contributor, and other less-than-prominent progressives and evangelicals. Jill Pike, Third Way's deputy director of public affairs, emailed me to say that, by trying to bridge the gap between the two groups, "we are not talking about compromising each other's values but instead creating an approach that will inevitably lend itself to progress and change." The statement itself asserts that the two groups want "the same protections, public benefits, and opportunities" for gays and lesbians. The signers also agree that, to reduce the incidence of abortion, young people need better access to contraception and more sex education. Well, at least evangelicals' values weren't compromised!
In fact, outreach initiatives are coming from both sides. A few days earlier, in Washington, D.C., the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) held its annual meeting, with Ban-Ki Moon, the United Nations secretary-general, as its guest speaker. For a religious group that has traditionally been skeptical of anything resembling "world government," this invitation was quite a step. "Some people will say the evangelical Christians have invited the Antichrist to the Last Supper," NAE president Richard Cizik told the crowd. But he explained that he was interested in hearing Mr. Ban (a Christian) talk about the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals--which include reducing poverty, increasing literacy rates and fighting AIDS, as well as ensuring environmental sustainability, promoting gender equity and empowering women. "Most evangelicals would support those values," he said of the MDGs--even if it takes a world-government sort of institution to achieve them, apparently.
Mr. Cizik is now somewhat notorious for such claims. Naturally, he has come under attack for them. In March, two-dozen prominent evangelicals sent a letter to the NAE board requesting his ouster, on the grounds that the association should stick to traditional social issues rather than get into environmentalism (what Mr. Cizik calls "creation care") and other seemingly liberal causes. Nor were evangelical leaders pleased when NAE representatives, over the summer, met with several leaders of Arab nations to assure them that American evangelicals are committed to a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mr. Cizik has retained his position, but the evangelical rank and file is still stewing. Danny Wood, the pastor of the 5,000-member Shades Mountain Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Ala., is deeply skeptical of evangelicals' embracing the idea of global warming and other "outlandish claims of environmentalists." Bill Hay, the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church a few miles away, makes a point of telling me that his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, debated leaving the NAE over Mr. Cizik's activities.
Last weekend, some of Mr. Cizik's biggest critics met during the Family Research Council's "Washington Briefing." It was billed as "the largest gathering of values voters from across the country," but the speakers provided less values-talk and more of that old-time religion. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, said of Third Way and its gap-bridging efforts: "If this is 'common ground,' we'd prefer to stand our own ground in defense of the natural definition of marriage and family and the unalienable right to life of every unborn child."
The GOP presidential hopefuls at the conference heard a lot of this sort of uncompromising message. The most prominent among them, like Rudy Giuliani, hold positions that are, for most evangelicals, too close to "common ground" for comfort. James Dobson, honored at a dinner Saturday night, has recently expressed his frustration with the GOP field. He is floating the idea of supporting a third-party candidate if the Republican nominee is not socially conservative enough.
Most evangelicals do not seem ready to follow the progressives into the wilderness of environmentalism, but neither do they seem especially moved by Mr. Dobson's third-party plans. Mr. Wood, the Birmingham pastor, tries to imagine the scenario: "So what I'm going to do is pull the Republican base and go 'nanny nanny boo boo'? And then the Democrats win? That doesn't make any sense to me."
Still, evangelicals have clearly lost their enthusiasm for the GOP. A recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life paints the picture: "Throughout Bush's first term, party identification among younger white evangelicals remained relatively stable, but since 2005 the group's Republican affiliation has dropped significantly--by 15 percentage points." The study notes, however, that "the shift away from the GOP has not resulted in substantial Democratic gains." In short, evangelicals seem adrift.
This development does not bode well for Republican turnout during next fall's presidential campaign. And who can place a value on that?
Ms. Riley is The Wall Street Journal's deputy Taste editor.
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