More Like This, Please.

Good stuff from an evangelical professor of religion in today's NYT:

IN the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?

Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.

(Several disturbing examples follow, including a Jerry Falwell essay titled "God is pro-war")

The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.

(snip)

"Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no action would be taken without United Nations authorization," [Jon Stott, according to David Brooks the closest thing to an evangelical pope] told me. "I believed then and now that the American and British governments erred in proceeding without United Nations approval." Reverend Stott referred me to "War and Rumors of War," a chapter from his 1999 book, "New Issues Facing Christians Today," as the best account of his position. In that essay he wrote that the Christian community's primary mission must be "to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the cross."

What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.

Essays and op-ed pieces like this are incredibly important, because I do not believe evangelicals take external criticism seriously. Coming from a non-evangelical or, worse yet, non-Christian such as myself, this sort of criticism can be dismissed as anti-religious or anti-Jesus. Of course, their own hatred and lust for blood and power makes them far more anti-Jesus than a Jewgnostic like myself.

Just as we must wait and hope for moderate Muslims to denounce their fundamentalist crazies, so too must we wait and hope for moderate Christians and evangelicals to do the same. And then hope that the calm, reasonable voices of Jesus's true followers can be heard over the insistent shouts of the false gods of intolerance and rage.