Evangelical elites, when speaking politically for ecclesial bodies, should stick with issues to which Scripture and Christian tradition speak most directly. As representatives of mostly democratic polities, they should also strive to represent a consensus view within their churches. Otherwise they will create resentment among their members and are likely not to be taken seriously by policymakers or, ultimately, the media. Their obligation towards consensus should include not just the church’s present but also its history. Every denomination has a tradition of special social concerns.

Why do evangelical leaders fail to excite the faithful about immigration reform and climate change?

Sometime liberal Baptist Jonathan Merritt recently wrote interestingly for Religion News Service about the seeming failure of evangelical elites to generate more push for “immigration reform,” which he himself supports. He’s a popular young author and columnist whose father was once president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Merritt notes that some prominent officials of evangelical groups, often working through the Evangelical Immigration Table, have toiled strenuously for immigration legislation. But they have failed to excite their constituency:

As it turns out, the evangelical movement on immigration has been mostly top-down and not bottom-up. It has failed to do the difficult work of convincing and mobilizing (or at least neutralizing) the millions of evangelical churchgoers and voters. As The New York Times reports, while “no prominent pastor has spoken out against the immigration (reform) effort … accord has been less broad among the faithful.”

Merritt cites one poll showing the numbers of white evangelicals favoring legalization of illegal immigrants, although a majority, largely unchanged across recent years. And he cites the same poll showing 63 percent of white evangelicals favoring deportation of illegal immigrants. He adds:

I can guarantee you that I am not the only one paying attention to these polls. Lawmakers are too. They know that the evangelical push for immigration reform has failed to penetrate into the core of the constituency. It’s mostly a grasstops movement of high-level leaders, many whom are unlikely to vote anything other than Republican in future elections regardless of whether Congress moves on immigration.

Grasstops is a good phrase to describe this phenomenon, which has become more common among some evangelical elites over the last decade. Merritt also cites the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative, which he supported, and which created a “media frenzy” but “failed to rally average, pew-sitting evangelicals,” who were not “convinced that climate change was man-caused and did not support political action, so many lawmakers ignored the effort.”

Merritt concludes that evangelical elites need to “innervate the everyday faithful, not just lawmakers” if they wish to be politically effective. There are other issues unmentioned by Merritt that some evangelical elites have championed in recent years without exciting genuine widespread support while still getting media hype. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), for example, has championed nuclear disarmament, opposed U.S. enhanced interrogation, and is strongly supporting the global Arms Trade Treaty. There’s little to no evidence that most of NAE’s constituency, which is overwhelmingly conservative, would share these official NAE views.

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