Hostetter again challenged such accusations by stating, “The inclination of evangelicals, and particularly of fundamentalists, is to take for granted that the Bible approves participation in war and [to] classify all opposition to it as identified with the pacifism espoused by liberals. The evangelical fellowship should be better informed.”

Yes, claims The Weekly Standard, a self-identified politically conservative news website.

In this article, site contributor Mark Tooley argues that the National Association of Evangelicals has in recently years become “more liberal” by taking certain stances on issues like the environment, U.S. enhanced interrogation techniques, federal budget policy and immigration. He views these stances as ones that “distance [the NAE] from the old religious right.” And he sees its recent policy on nuclear weapons as further evidence of this liberalization. (The Search for Piety and Obedience wrote about the NAE’s recent resolution on nuclear weapons here.)

Here’s a taste of the piece:

Over the Summer an initial NAE nuclear discussion group included Tyler Wigg-Stevenson of the Two Futures Project, a group aimed at persuading evangelicals to back complete nuclear disarmament. A former protégé to the late Democratic Senator Alan Cranston, Wigg-Stevenson helped present the draft nuclear statement to the NAE board in October, though he himself is not a board member. During the Summer discussion, NAE President Leith Anderson, a Minnesota megachurch pastor whose flock includes former Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, reportedly insisted NAE would not explicitly advocate complete nuclear disarmament. But the new NAE stance almost certainly will be widely interpreted in that direction.

The new nuclear stance also comes in the wake of the NAE’s having joined liberal religious activist Jim Wallis’s “Circle of Protection” to protest limits on social welfare and entitlement spending. An NAE representative joined Wallis and others in a visit with President Obama during the July debt ceiling crisis that seemingly aligned NAE against Congressional Republicans. Although widely criticized outside the NAE, the “Circle of Protection” apparently was not debated at last month’s NAE board meeting, whose sessions were closed. Read the whole piece here.

Tooley may be right in asserting that the NAE is becoming “more liberal.” (I would prefer to use language like “progressive,” but that might be splitting hairs.) In some ways, evangelicalism as a whole is diversifying on the issues noted above, with some segments of the broader movement taking a “conservative” approach and others taking “liberal” positions. So the NAE is not unique in this way.

It should also be noted that self-proclaimed evangelicals like Ron Sider have been arguing against nuclear proliferation for decades. So this kind of opposition to the military-industrial complex is not unique within the American evangelical world.

Though he may (and I use the term “may” lightly) be right to point out the NAE’s “liberalization,” Tooley does, however, make some historically incorrect statements in his article — ones that bear a great deal on his present claims.

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