The following is an interview in America magazine by Jesuit scholastic Sean Salai:
You’ve been director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a conservative Protestant religious think tank, since 2009. What have been some of your goals and accomplishments since taking over?
A major goal has been to warn Evangelicals away from repeating so many of the mistakes that sidelined once dominant Mainline Protestantism. So we focus a lot on the Evangelical Left’s push to make Evangelicalism look more like liberal Protestantism, i.e., going squishy on abortion and marriage, downplaying the exclusivity of Jesus Christ and pushing for a statist political witness that mimics the secular Left. We started a new program, Evangelical Action, headed by a young woman, Chelsen Vicari, to sound the alarm over the Evangelical Left, and to remind Evangelicals, especially the young, that their strength and hope depend on remaining faithful to a robust orthodoxy. Chelsen’s written an important book called Distortion: How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Comment by Pudentiana on September 21, 2015 at 11:43 am
After reading the entire article I am delighted with its content and the wise responses to probing questions. Mr. Tooley is an excellent spokesmen for Evangelicals and faithful United Methodists. His vision is sound and brilliant.
Comment by Brad F on September 25, 2015 at 12:49 pm
Speaking of Jesuits…
three days ago, one of the earliest activists for the so-called Queer Theology died, John J. McNeill. The Jesuits finally booted him out of the order in 1988, after putting up with decades of his lambasting his own church for its homophobia.” Unfortunately, the gays still dominate the Jesuit
order, as you can discover from any issue of the Jesuit magazine, America (it has been pushing for gay “marriage” for years). This pope is going to do nothing at all about the gay monastic orders, any more than his predecessors did, so the sexual scandals will continue among these men who have no scruples about breaking their vows of celibacy. The media prefer to focus on “pedophile priests,” conveniently ignoring that the same men who are preying on eleven-year-old boys are also having frequent sex with men their own age. There is no line between “gay” and “pedophile.” Francis is a Jesuit. Whether he has been faithful to his vow of celibacy or not, he must have thousands of friends in the Jesuit order, and he would be the last person to put a stop to their libertinism.