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2012 election, Institute on Religion and Democracy, IRD Blog, Jim Wallis, Obamacare, Politics, Sojourners
By Mark Tooley
The Evangelical Left has mostly been low profile this election season. Many liberal evangelicals were quite ecstatic for Barack Obama in 2008. A handful were previously George W. Bush supporters. John McCain still got an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals, about 70 percent, though down from Bush’s full throttle 75 percent in 2004, which fueled fears of theocracy on the far Left. In 2008 Obama did do better among young evangelicals, inspiring expectations that evangelicals were slowly shifting left.
An open question now is whether Romney gets the same overall 2008 level of 70 percent of white evangelicals or closer to Bush’s 75 percent. A recent poll from the Pew Research Center has Romney getting 75 percent. This statistic is fairly remarkable, as Romney, unlike Bush, is not himself evangelical, does not routinely speak of his own faith, and has not focused on hot button social issues that energize many evangelicals. It’s been widely assumed that many evangelicals are uncomfortable with Romney’s Mormonism. Any discomfort evidently is not affecting many votes.
Read more here.
After having a summer time connected with sporting practice and all sorts of distractions, right now we all have to visit “back in order to school” and get lets start on hard operate.
On p 63 of Wallis’ book The Great Awakening, he says “in all my growing-up years in our evangelical church, I never heard a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount.” That isn’t just a lie, but a WHOPPER. There is no church, anywhere, certainly not an evangelical church, where the pastor would never preach on the Sermon, one of the most-quoted sections of the Bible. I was tempted to throw the book across the room after reading that. His point, of course, was that evangelicals don’t take the words of Jesus seriously while liberals do. But the lesson I got from reading that sentence was liberals, even ones claiming to be Christians, are absolutely shameless when it comes to praising themselves and deriding the Religious Right.
I grew up Southern Baptist and certainly don’t recall MUCH if anything in the way of entire sermons on the SOTM. Casual asides to favorite parts of it, but nothing like I hear nowadays in more anabaptist circles. For what it’s worth.
We should not presume to denounce complete strangers as liars when we simply do not know what they did and didn’t experience. Shame on you.
Well, if Harry Reid was running for President the left would dropped the Mormon issue off since Reid is both a Democratic and a Mormon. I agree I usually don’t agree with Wallis’s politics but he really is a christian.
While I don’t always agree with Wallis, I find him to be a great man of God and disagree with folk gossiping about him.
Discuss IDEAS all you want, disagree with an IDEA expressed by Wallis or someone else, but leave the gossip for school girls (with apologies to the many decent school girls out there who would never gossip about someone, since they know better than that).
Mark Tooley, who worked for eight years as an analyst for the CIA before joining the IRD, is a Zionist shill, a tool to dispel the true agenda of the Pharisaical elites who are conquering American and Christianity to establish its New World Order. Just saying!
I thought the NWO conspiracy theory went out of style in the early 90s.
You need to get the swing catholics
Better a Mormon sometimes than a liberal protestant in both theology and politics.
Most of the left leaning youth in my church LOVE Wallis. They quote him on their FB pages almost daily. To your average church goer they probably don’t know him, but those who are big into left-wing activism seem to.
You need to take those kids to the woodshed – or at least give them a good lecture.
Or, find a better church.
Agreed. Which is why I’m visiting other churches lately.
Most evangelicals I know, even the left-of-center ones, don’t even know who Jim Wallis is, much less care. I’m amazed that anyone regards anything he says as newsworthy. Find him a pasture to graze in, his heyday (if he had one) was when eight-track tapes were in vogue.
They have supplanted their principles for the idolatries of nationalism, money and power.