[greenyes] More on religion and environment

[amy perlmutter <amyperl@no.address>]

Title: More on religion and environment

From Boston Globe. This is just the first 1/2 of the article, the rest doesn’t talk about environment.  But if you’d like to read it, the link is http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/02/05/official_chides_christian_right/.


Official chides Christian right

Moral Majority called aberration

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff  |  February 5, 2005

SOUTH HAMILTON -- Evangelical Protestants, despite enjoying increasing cultural influence as a result of their perceived electoral clout, have sometimes ''lost their perspective" by paying too little attention to social concerns such as the environment and poverty, leading evangelicals said yesterday.


A top official of the National Association of Evangelicals told reporters gathered at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that the Moral Majority, a 1980s political movement dominated by Christian conservatives, was ''an aberration and a regrettable one at that," even though it drew evangelicals into the political process, because the organization was ''fatally flawed by a hubris that made the movement condescending and more than a bit judgmental."

''The Moral Majority lacked a servant heart of Christ born out of humility and compassion for a fallen humanity," said the official, Robert Wenz, who is vice president of national ministries for the National Association of Evangelicals.

''Instead, it was all about making America a nice place for Christians to live. This is not the kind of social involvement that we need or that evangelicals espouse."

Instead, Wenz cited as a positive sign what he described as ''a reemergence of the evangelical church in the inner city" with programs addressing substance abuse, parenting, and ''healing ministries of all kinds." He said those churches have emerged at a time when many of the more visible evangelical churches, the so-called megachurches, have located in suburban areas.

Wenz spoke at the first of a series of courses that evangelicals, basking in attention following polls suggesting that moral values played a role in President Bush's reelection, are holding in an effort to explain the influential religious movement to news reporters. Organizers plan similar sessions at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., next month, and then at seminaries in Dallas and Los Angeles.

Wenz said it is important for evangelicals to be clear that they have no allegiance to the Republican Party and that the GOP owes them nothing. In an interview, he said evangelicals, for example, are increasingly concerned about environmental issues, not an issue traditionally associated with the Republican Party.

''Global warming is a reality and is not a bunch of liberal hype," Wenz said in an interview.

John Jefferson Davis, a professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Gordon-Conwell, said, ''The Democratic Party is now saying, 'We've got to recover moral language,' but I would also like to see a Republican Party whose Christian component has a more holistic understanding of moral values. . . .

''Evangelicals are diverse in their concerns for moral values, abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research, but also an important part of tradition says matters of race, poverty, and the environment are, or should be, part of our ethic."