A good article on Evangelical Christian democrats by Amy Sullivan in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/24/ST2008022402257.html?sid=ST2008022402257
Be sure to read the discussion with Amy about the topic and about her book here.
In the discussion she points out that about 1/3 of Democrats are pro-life. Hurray! But that's not as high as the percentage of Republicans that are pro-choice! Weird.
8 comments:
check out http://jesusforpresident.org/
Can't help but notice that you have been reading the same Jenkins book for about 2 months now. Boy do theologians read slow.
I appreciated this article. I wonder if you personally hold to some of Lipscomb's views on political involvement? As a pacifist myself, I have always taken for granted that we need to be involved in politics, actively vote, etc.--that is, until recently.
Having read Lipscomb's "Civil Government" with its admonition to even abstain from voting lest one inadvertently vote for someone who would later declare war, I felt strangely pleased. I had been naive of the pacifist position in the Restoration Movement and thought I was an anomaly, but it seems now that this is not the case. My pacifist world view is evidently more in line with those of Stone and Campbell than our institutional views towards violence today. This should be a louder conversation, I think.
Actually, Matt, we were the only church granted conscious objector status on both sides of the Civil War. We might still be a primarily pacifist movement if the journals could have gotten around a misuse of the sedition act to infringe free-speech about pacifism (directed specifically at journals of the SCRM) after the advent of the selective service during WWI.
Perhaps a more widely held pacifism can be resurrected again in the church, no?
Perhaps, but I doubt that any such movement will be very influential unless we stop identifying Christianity with government. Many people in the CofC consider capitalism and democracy part of Christianity.
They can be good things, but unless we can stop worshiping them or equating them with Christianity, we are very limited in the theological directions that we can accept as a movement.
If I would pay attention to my own blog now and then. . . .
Can pacifism be revived in the C2? I think it already is alive and well. I started a Facebook group, "Churches of Christ Peace Fellowship," soon after Facebook started up. It doesn't get a lot of active discussion, but it has 122 members currently. A related group is "God is not an American." It has 386 members (I didn't start that one, and it is certainly not just a C2 group). But, Ty, I agree that we have to learn that God is neither American nor capitalist. Until we learn that, we'll go on being willing to kill on behalf of "freedom of religion," which we take to be a Christian "right," and which means we end up killing on behalf of the Prince of Peace. Kinda makes your head spin, doesn't it? Like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist."
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