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This Coming Election:
What do Evangelicals Want? (Part I)
by John Mark Reynolds [author,
academic] 8/15/08
It was comical and sad when a great thinker could ask, “What do women want?” as if women were a mysterious minority as opposed to over half the human race. In some ways it is also amusing and more than a little depressing that Evangelicals are treated as a mystery when there are so many of them.
In all probability around one in three of your co-workers or friends is an Evangelical Christian. Abraham Lincoln was elected partially through an overt appeal to Evangelical votes, so Evangelicals are not new to American electoral politics or to the Republican Party. William Jennings Bryan, an Evangelical using Biblical arguments, thundered across America three times
as a progressive Democrat candidate for President, so Evangelicals are not new to Democrat Party politics either.
Contributor
John Mark Reynolds
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of
the Torrey Honors Institute and Associate Professor
of Philosophy at Biola University.His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at http://scriptoriumdaily.com.
[go to Reynolds index] |
Going out on a pundit limb, one can predict that the huge Evangelical African-American population is not really in play this election cycle. What about the rest of Evangelicals? What do these Evangelicals want?
There are so many Evangelicals of this sort that one can be sure that they mostly want what every American of good will wants regardless of creed, race, or ethnicity. They share many of the strengths and weaknesses of the American public in general. However, Evangelicals have over a century in political activity and have learned a thing or two. Their theological knowledge does give them a unique perspective on a few issues, but so does their history in America.
In my experience, most of these Evangelicals, like most Americans, want four things from a candidate. First, they want a person with good character and the competence to govern well. Second, they long for a candidate who will defend traditional American ideas about faith and
politics. Third, they want a compassionate man, but one who does not propose policies whose good intentions are swallowed up by bad consequences. Finally, following the American Declaration of Independence they want a candidate who will defend the most fundamental God-given right: the right to life.
Character and Competence
Evangelicals know, as other communities will eventually discover, that having one of their own in the White House is only as encouraging as the competence of the president. Good theology does not always make a man a good president. Competence and character must be combined.
Good character is wasted when combined with incompetence in governing. However, competence with bad character is also not good for the nation as both Nixon and Clinton proved. Wise voters try not to choose.
Competence is hard to measure, but is best discovered in the life experiences of the candidates. With only rare exceptions, such as Lincoln, successful presidents have shown their leadership qualities in successful careers before seeking the White House.
Character is also hard to quantify. How much do the sins of a candidate matter? In this age of total information, there is no hiding the foibles of a nominee. The good news is that Evangelicals know repentant sinners (see David and Paul) can make great leaders.
While nobody is perfect and Evangelicals are happy to accept changed hearts, the growth in integrity should not be recent and it should be backed up by actions. Both McCain, with adultery, and Obama, with drug use, have admitted to past misdeeds, but both have repented from them and shown evidence of change. Unlike John Edwards or Larry Craig, Evangelicals want such major character flaws to be in the past for a candidate.
Ideally, a great leader should be “willing to lay down his life for a friend” and also love his neighbor at least as much as he loves himself, a difficult thing to find amidst the narcissism of politics. Evangelicals want a candidate willing to live for a noble cause bigger than self, not just in words but deeds.
Like most Americans, Evangelicals have historically distrusted candidates who seem to live only for their next and greater job.
Church and State: Avoiding the Modern Extremists
This is not the only lesson Evangelicals have learned from their long history in American politics. They also benefit from the American tradition of no formal state church combined with an informal civil religion that broadly reflects the views of most citizens. Like most Americans, they reject a theocracy, but also the ideological extremism of total secularism. They like singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and seeing manger scenes on courthouse steps. They don’t want an officially Christian nation, but don’t want a government afraid to admit that the nation is mostly made up of Christians.
Evangelicals want McCain and Obama to ignore the ideologues on both sides. They want to know if either candidate will go too far in either direction. Evangelicals want a candidate who can acknowledge our overwhelmingly religious heritage and nature as a people while allowing as much freedom for the tiny secular minority as possible. They want a candidate whose campaign, and advisors, reflect their values.
Compassion That Does More Good Than Harm
Evangelicals, like most Americans, draw on the ancient Jewish and Christian traditions of loving one’s neighbor and showing compassion to the weak and disadvantaged. This is a positive feature of the movement. Evangelicals give enormous amounts to charity and have a long and ongoing tradition of work with the weak and the poor, but this strength can be a weakness if it leads to good hearted but wrongheaded policy.
Decades of brutal political reality have show that good intentions are not enough. Just because a person should receive help somehow does not tell Evangelicals the best means to give it.
Most Evangelicals support limited government, because experience has shown that government programs generally do as much harm as good. They risk breeding dependence on the state and often perpetuate injustice on another group as part of “helping” the disadvantaged. This creates a cycle of resentment and injustice helpful to nobody.
Evangelicals are not ideologues, so they are open to persuasion about particular programs, but they have been around long enough to know that most government programs do not do enough good to justify the real harm they do. Like many other good hearted Americans, the good intentions of Evangelicals can be exploited by demagogues to increase the power of the state through the proclamation of noble goals, but bitter experience has taught most Evangelicals to be wary of such rhetoricians.
Evangelicals want their leaders to acknowledge the limits of what government can do as well as explore the possibilities.
Help to the poor and the needy must not hurt them in other ways or perpetuate injustices upon other groups. If you rob plutocrat Pauline to pay poor Paul, you train government workers to steal. These bad habits will not stop with plutocrats, but end by making serfs of Pauline and Paul. If you turn poor Paul into a ward of the state with his welfare check, then you may have done more harm to his soul than good to his body. If you undermine the role of civic organizations, churches, charities, and families, by teaching Paul that the state will meet all his needs, then
you have damaged Paul’s ability to live in a republic.
Evangelicals want government to defend the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and security in the ownership of private property.
Defending the Right to Life
One issue will help guide many Evangelicals this fall. It is not the only important issue, but it is a fundamental one. If a candidate does not wish to protect innocent human life, then he has failed in his most basic duty as the chief executive of this nation.
Evangelicals know that the dead have no freedom to choose, and so embrace a culture of life. They affirm the value of all human life regardless of race, age, ethnicity, perceived handicap, or social class. Americans can disagree about the best means to be a good neighbor to the living, but there is no possibility of a good relationship with the aborted, the euthanized, or the dead.
Tax policy can be debated, but not the right to life. Evangelicals overwhelmingly want a candidate to defend innocent human life at every phase. They don’t want a candidate that acknowledges their position, but one who agrees with it.
Sadly, every American era has had a blind spot regarding the protection of the lives of some humans. In our own era the right to life for the unborn child has been most directly under assault. A candidate who ignores this fact is not going to get the most Evangelical votes.
President Ronald Reagan summarized their views in Human Life Review:
“Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: ” . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life.
Reagan also exposed a dirty secret of the culture of death. It will still be relevant to Evangelicals and any other Christian deciding between Obama and McCain:
Some unborn children do survive the late-term abortions the Supreme Court has made legal. Is there any question that these victims of abortion deserve our attention and protection? Is there any question that those who don’t survive were living human beings before they were killed?
Late-term abortions, especially when the baby survives, but is then killed by starvation, neglect, or suffocation, show once again the link between abortion and infanticide.
Fundamentally, Evangelicals want to know of McCain or Obama: “What have you done to end this horror? How have you voted?”
The candidate who cannot give a good answer, Reagan’s answer, to this question will not get the majority of Evangelical votes and is not worthy of a single one of them. ExileStreet
copyright
2008 John Mark Reynolds
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