The Evangelical Left in less than a generation has garishly embraced statism as God’s instrument for justice on earth. The policies of the current Administration nearly encapsulated all that the Evangelical Left sought.

Following is the annual report of the President Mark Tooley to the Board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD)

The largely labor union organized rally on the National Mall this past Saturday called “One Nation Working Together” was aimed at energizing left-leaning voters for next month’s election. Its themes included more federal controlled health care, more mortgage bail-outs and higher minimum wages, U.S. military withdrawal, and nondiscrimination laws for sexual minorities, including the vaguely described transgendered.

Over 400 groups endorsed, from the AFL-CIO, to the National Education Association, to the NAACP, to the Human Rights Campaign, to Planned Parenthood. Even the Communist Party USA was touted on the rally’s website, which would have caused many labor leaders of 30 years ago to sputter in the graves.

Of course, the Religious Left was there too, but minimally so, surprisingly. Of the Mainline Protestants, only the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Board of Church and Society endorsed. The National Council of Churches, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians were uncharacteristically silent.

Interestingly, Jim Wallis Sojourners, as the nation’s most prominent Evangelical Left group, was on board.

More interestingly, the United Methodist lobby office, on Friday, suddenly and almost without precedent, withdrew its endorsement. Its chief explained that his Board of Church and Society was “disturbed by some of the overtly political and partisan statements issued by organizers of the march.”

He also explained that the list of endorsing groups “grew to include a variety of organizations that created enormous and unnecessary controversy.” Revealingly, he complained of the “vitriol” in many emails and phone calls from church members across the nation.

At least partially, IRD can claim credit for some of those supposedly vitriolic emails and phone calls! In the 1980’s, the United Methodist and other church agencies often endorsed far-left rallies with Soviet-front groups with no thought to rescinding their support. The current age of instantaneous electronic communication has maybe created a new era of somewhat better accountability, at least in the most egregious situations.

But how noteworthy that “One Nation Standing Together” retained endorsement from only one major Mainline group, while the Evangelical Left flagship Sojourners, despite its supposed quest for post-ideological centrism, apparently gave no serious thought to withdrawing, with or without the Communist Party USA.

Will the Evangelical Left in some ways exceed the extremism of even the old-line Protestants? It seems unimaginable. But the Evangelical Left, largely untethered to denominational structures, may ultimately careen and implode far faster than did the old Religious Left, which deflated across many decades.

The exposure of Jim Wallis’ funding by George Soros, though logical and even unremarkable, still surprised some of his evangelical supporters who naively had absorbed his rhetoric of transcending Left and Right. This year, with historic hindsight, may mark the high tide of Jim Wallis’ influence, and maybe of the Evangelical Left’s overall, at least for this era.

Even if crested, the tide of the Evangelical Left will take many more years to fully recede, taking with it the confusion and shattered dreams of may well intentioned believers, especially among the young. Many young evangelicals, and less excusably, even some of their pastors and professors, have no direct memories, or historical knowledge of the Cold War, of the Jimmy Carter nightmare years, of the mortal and cosmic threat that nuclear armed Soviet communism had once posed to peace and decency.

They did not remember the stagflation and malaise of the 1970’s, when the welfare and regulatory state consumed ever increasing shares of stagnant economies. Nor did they remember when many conservative evangelicals, appalled not only by economic and international threats, but also alarmed by moral decay, took to politics for nearly the first time for the redemption of their country.

They inevitably made mistakes, and were caricatured as the malevolent Religious Right. But their exertions contributed to the Cold War’s successful conclusion, to economic, free market revival in America and elsewhere, and to at least worthy struggle against grinding secularization and complete collapse of moral standards regarding sanctity of life, marriage, and religion’s public role.

The Evangelical Left’s generation that knew not Joseph forgot much if not all that history and instead almost fully swallowed the Left’s nightmarish defamation of religious conservatives as mean, foolish, and ineffective. This new generation imagined that if Evangelicals sounded more like The New York Times, that Christianity would become widely more popular, especially among the very educated, mostly white, urban elites that seem most to interest the Evangelical Left.

Lacking the stately history that the Mainline Protestants at least had when they succumbed to the Social Gospel starting 100 year ago, the Evangelical Left in less than a generation has garishly embraced statism as God’s instrument for justice on earth. The policies of the current Administration nearly encapsulated all that the Evangelical Left sought. Jim Wallis, in January 2009, described President Obama’s inauguration as almost the equivalent of the Transfiguration.

Our nation’s newly rediscovered antipathy to unrestricted Big Government and the vast social experiments that inevitably accompany it will discredit, at least for many, much of the Evangelical Left’s agenda. Lessons that should not have been forgotten will be learned anew by a rising generation.

We can hope that many young evangelicals, and maybe even some of their clergy and professors, will realize, with the zealous brightness of conversion, that the Gospel means so much more than the endless and coercive expansion of government taxation and regulation.

They may also appreciate that, contrary to the mythology of their elites, conservative evangelicals and other Christians are not the world’s chief villains, that America is not the world’s most monstrous nation, and that poverty and pollution are not the natural consequence of free markets. Perhaps they will even begin to realize that the earth and its ecosystem are not on the precipice of a climate cataclysm, thanks to SUV’s and too little recycling.

Wisdom and prudence rely on remembrance. The inclusion of the Communist Party USA, however inconsequential its own size and influence, in Saturday’s rally along with Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, indicates how much so many have forgotten about the last century.

IRD, formed in the Cold War’s final crucial battle years, has not forgotten. And lest we are ever tempted to think IRD’s mission is not as urgent as 30 years ago, we should only survey much America’s religious impulses today. Besides the embrace of statism, now hopefully cresting, there is the cavalier stance towards Islam.

Prominent evangelicals and Mainline Protestants and Catholics have treated any skepticism of the Ground Zero project as the moral equivalent of anti-Semitism. They are unwilling to admit that guaranteeing constitutional protections for all in America should not preclude a thoughtful exploration of how traditionally theocratic Islam can successfully integrate into American democracy.

More tragically, too many evangelicals and Mainliners and Catholics are falling nearly silent about the plight of Christians living under Islam, eerily reminiscent of the outrageous indifference to Christians behind the Iron Curtain that generated IRD’s creation.

Our current times, of course, are challenging and even exciting. IRD has always thrived in lively times and we can anticipate many energizing battles ahead.

Hardly discouraged, we can be confident that our God remains as ever the Lord of all history, and His will shall prevail. Our responsibility is to be faithful, patient, perseverant and, hopefully, to enjoy the pleasure of serving Him, especially in adversity, of which there is plenty.

Mark Tooley became president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) in 2009. Tooley has been with the IRD since 1994, directing the United Methodist committee (UMAction) of the Institute on Religion & Democracy. This article is from the IRD website and is used with permission. Source: https://www.theird.org/Page.aspx?pid=1644&frcrld=1

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]