The difficulty, as I see it, is that the evangelical world is unable to tolerate dissent. Unity has become uniformity. Authority cannot be questioned. However, on matters of politics, particularly, which are so subject to personal judgment or prudence, we need to grant some freedom

If you’ve never changed your mind about something, you may be dead. Spiritually, intellectually, and even politically, if new facts and realities don’t ever prompt you to alter your way of thinking, you might as well be dead. To not learn and change, especially spiritually, is a form of death.

But change is hard. It’s also risky.

I know about the consequences of changing one’s thinking. I was fired from my position as vice-president for governmental relations at the National Association of Evangelicals. That’s right, I was asked to resign for comments made on a nationally syndicated radio show called “Fresh Air.” I provided too much “fresh air” for my bosses to handle. Officially, I was asked to resign. But the reality is that I was fired.

This event devastated me and my family. We were shocked that such a drastic action had been taken. “Please have your office cleared out within a few days”—these were my instructions. That wasn’t an easy thing to do. I had worked for the Association since 1980, and this was 2008. So, for twenty-eight years I had faithfully represented the organization, the last ten as vice president. I loved it and the people I had worked with.

Being axed in such a fashion proved hard. As if to dramatize their dissatisfaction, my “going away” severance was three months of salary. It was a clear message: please, just go away. Or as one editor wrote: “Evangelicals, one surmises, aren’t always against divorce.”

I was heartbroken. The nation’s newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as small dailies such as my hometown Free Lance-Star, ran stories with these headlines: “Evangelical Leader Quits Over Gay Union Remark,” and “Truth Breaks a Fall.”

In a broad-ranging conversation about my work to educate my fellow evangelicals about the impacts of climate change, I told Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” that I could support “civil unions” for gays and lesbians and that government funding of contraception was morally acceptable as a way to avoid abortion.

Perhaps most offensive to the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, which had given speaking platforms for Republican candidates for the presidency going back to Ronald Reagan, and whose officials I had joined for election campaigns for these Republican candidates, was that I said I had voted for candidate Barack Obama in the Virginia primary (against Hillary Clinton) for the presidency. Implied, of course, was that I had voted for Obama in the general election of 2008. And Barack Obama is a Democrat.

The impacts were felt personally and professionally. It prompted the president of Houghton College to write and cancel my graduation speech. It prompted Denver Seminary, where I had graduated, to drop me from the Advisory Board of the Grounds Institute of Public Ethics. It prompted the head of a family ministry, Marriage Savers, which I had served as a board member, to call me and tell me, “We’re dropping you from the board of directors.”

Sadly, it prompted friends and colleagues to shun me and no longer inquire about my health and well-being. Even our friends from church, where we had attended faithfully for a decade, didn’t understand.

A poll by America On Line (AOL) asked its readers to weigh in on this question: “Did the National Association of Evangelicals do the right thing in firing Richard Cizik?” Nearly 50,000 cast ballots. By a slim majority the consensus was “yes.”

So who’s to blame? I had lived on the edge of American evangelicalism, speaking out on the need to broaden the movement’s agenda to include issues such as climate change, and, if you will pardon the flat-Earth imagery, tumbled over the edge.

While I didn’t represent the NAE in the interview with Bose-like fidelity, I did represent millions of evangelicals—especially the younger ones. Friends such as Dr. David Gushee at Mercer University and Katie Paris of Faith in Public Life posted a website where one hundred evangelical leaders signed a letter affirming my ministry and principles, and the need for the Association to carry on with these principles.

However, for most evangelicals who dare to differ with their fellow evangelicals over issues of politics, there’s no one to come to their defense. Personal friendships or relationships are frayed, sometimes even broken.

How did this rigid political conformity happen? Sociologist Robert Putnam has argued that most evangelicals now choose their local church based upon its political views, not theology. Within the unique evangelical subculture, the prevailing beliefs are conservative. To be politically liberal, and express that viewpoint, can get you fired. Politics is the new orthodoxy.

Should the NAE be blamed? Arguably, it did what it had to do to preserve its reputation for conservative Christianity. Did it really do the right thing? What message did it send?

Inescapably, the message is this: “We are controlled and intimidated by the Religious (that is, Political) Right and will do whatever it takes to avoid their criticism.”

That’s why the evangelical church in America is in big trouble. It has lost its center: the Gospel. It is a movement that has been captured by conservative politics and treats that message as more important than the Gospel. It will do anything, literally anything, to maintain the conservative status quo. Throw anyone overboard. Avoid taking a stand on controversial topics, such as climate change. Even refuse to confront racism, Islamophobia, or antigay bigotry. No matter the heresy, or bad judgment, organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals will choose to walk away from a controversy before they will confront the major figures of the Religious Right.

This is why I often say, “We need to put the protest back in Protestantism.” Not against Catholicism as in Martin Luther’s day, but on behalf of the holistic Gospel. Why do I say this? We who are evangelicals have allowed ourselves to be co-opted by a pale substitute of the real thing.

NOW I SERVE AS president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good (NEP). Wherever I speak now, someone always comes up to say something like: “I’d never heard of you until I was driving down the highway listening to your interview on National Public Radio. I want to commend you for your courage in speaking out.”

The agenda for my ill-fated interview on “Fresh Air” focused on my views about American evangelicalism and my role as a lobbyist for the NAE. Terri Gross had been following my efforts to educate the movement on what we had begun to call “creation care,” a term designed to help frame biblical truth about the need to care for the environment.

Leading figures of the Religious Right had been attacking me for years. In 2006 the Evangelical Environmental Network released the “Evangelical Climate Initiative,” which I had helped formulate and market to our movement. The following year, radio broadcaster and child psychologist Dr. James Dobson became so disturbed by what he called my “relentless campaigning” about the reality of climate change that he and twenty-five other leading figures in the conservative movement essentially demanded my resignation. At that time, the NAE’s President Leith Anderson backed me, suggesting that my work as a spokesman for the NAE was equally balanced between a host of duties and issues, none of which were related to global warming. But that support would evaporate in late 2008.

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