A Biblical View from the Left?

In March of 2008 I attended a dinner for faculty members of Cedarville University. The featured speaker that evening was Dr. Mark Caleb Smith, Director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville. In the Q & A time that followed a colleague, noting polls indicating that younger evangelicals are not as likely to be solidly Republican, asked Smith if he thought that this represented a growing trend among evangelical college students. Smith’s reply, and admittedly I am paraphrasing, was no because college students do not represent a consistent voting group.

While I cannot know for sure, the question of my colleague may well have been based in, what God’s Politics author and Sojourner’s magazine editor-in-chief Jim Wallis notes is a growing interest among younger evangelicals to political issues beyond abortion and same-sex marriage. Noting that God is neither a Republican or a Democrat, Wallis believes that younger evangelicals are increasingly attempting to apply the tenets of their faith to issues such as poverty, environmental concerns, and social justice issues such as fair trade, wages, and health care (to name just a few). As younger evangelicals begin to consider these issues as biblical concerns they are comparing the stances of the two major parties in the U.S. and increasing numbers are attracted to the positions of the Democrats.

While it may be true that college students, evangelical ones included, may not vote as faithfully as those who have graduated, I respectfully disagree with Smith and believe that the affinity of younger evangelicals to more progressive responses to social issues DOES represent a growing trend. It is a trend which older evangelicals, long-time supporters of the GOP (aka “God’s Own Party” at least in their minds), may find difficult to accept. What may be even more difficult for life-long evangelical Republicans is that they may well have violated that age-old adage, “be careful what you wish for. . . . you may get.”

I began in Christian education in the early 1980s. As a high school and middle school teacher, youth group worker, and higher educator, the emphasis of evangelical education has been on biblical integration and the application of the truth of Scripture to every aspect of life. This emphasis has been well founded. Throughout the 20th century the evangelical academy had seceded many disciplines to non-biblical thinking, areas which represented legitimate expressions of Christian concern. The result was that the thinking of many believers was dualistic, where biblical principles directed thinking in some aspects of life while in other areas the thinking (and behavior) of believers was not much different than non-believers. Noting that “all truth is God’s truth,” evangelical scholars and educators were challenged by leaders of the Church to prepare future leaders to think biblically, to develop in students a biblical worldview that would encompass and direct their thinking in every aspect of life.

Evangelicals schools, colleges, and universities responded by making biblical integration and worldview training their number one priority. During this time the Reagan revolution and conservative social agenda throughout the late 20th and early 21st century of most evangelicals tended to be centered on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage. Republicans generally supported banning (or limiting) abortions and maintaining that same-sex unions should be illegal. These positions were warmly received by most evangelical voters while the generally pro-choice and more tolerant views of the Democrats were considered anathema. For some evangelicals, to vote Democrat was such a direct contradiction to the Bible that one could not be considered both a Christian and a Democrat. Yet, despite the conservative political climate of most white evangelical churches, a slow but noticeable change seems to have occurred. In proclaiming that all truth is God’s truth and that the principles of the Bible apply to all areas of human concern, a growing number of bright students noticed that all areas must mean ALL areas. That to limit the extent of evangelical participation in politics to such single-issue concerns as abortion or same-sex marriage violated the very principles that they had been taught to think from.

Does a federal budget that spends over a third of its dollars on the military and more than the next fifteen nations of the world combined represent a biblical budget? Does using only market-based models to determine human worth in terms of wages and benefits violate the image of God and the intrinsic value of human work? Do stewardship concerns and the biblical mandate to “cultivate and to keep” (Gen. 2:15) require government regulation of a consumer–based market economy? If biblical principles extend to every aspect of life than, increasingly, many evangelicals have begun to see these issues as important. As many evangelicals have looked for legitimate political expression on these issues many have found that the more progressive stances of the Democratic Party (and, at times, the Green Party) represent more biblical responses to these issues than the GOP.

This does not mean, in my opinion, that younger evangelicals will suddenly represent a monolithic voting block for the left similar to the right-wing tendencies of their parents and teachers. The Reagan Revolution that began 30 years ago has been characterized by a religious faith in the power of markets as a perfect mechanism (for some God’s created mechanism) for the just distribution of goods and services. The conservative, free-market trinity of privatization, deregulation, and union-busting has, for many, been combined with the divine Trinity to such an extent that to question the former is to deny the latter. For many the ideological monopoly of Chicago-school capitalism with evangelical Christianity makes voting Republican the only game in town. Yet, for a growing number of young people, the ensuing results of neo-liberal capitalism—growing unemployment, environmental exploitation, growing discrepancies between rich and poor, increasingly limited access to social and educational resources, etc.—have called the union of Milton Friedman and Jesus Christ into question.

The Left Pew is a blog dedicated to continuing a growing dialogue to the question—can the biblical worldview be extended to social issues in ways that question the cultural accommodations that many Christians have made to the mandates of Scripture? These cultural accommodations represent compromises by the very people that most seek to preserve the integrity of the Bible and its principles—the church. While I will not suggest that progressivism is the ONLY biblical answer to growing number of social issues coming to the attention of the church, I will suggest that the conservative monopoly on evangelical thinking has limited the dialogue, polarized many believers and prevented the church from considering alternative responses which are more biblically consistent and would serve to extend the influence and ministry of the church to a watching world.