Evangelicals seek to clarify their beliefs to a wary public

HAMILTON, Mass. -- Recognizing that many Americans worry about their influence following President Bush's re-election, evangelicals are saying that they have been misunderstood and -- in some ways -- remain underdogs in a nation they consider hostile to public talk about faith.

The image of evangelicals is a key element in an ongoing series of conferences in Washington and other cities explaining the movement; the first meeting was held last week at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary outside Boston.

Speakers at the gathering, organized by the seminary, listed what they consider among the biggest myths about evangelicals: that they are anti-intellectual; that they seek to create a Christian government in the United States; and that their belief that salvation comes only through Christ is intolerant and aims to silence other religious expression.

Timothy Tennent, professor of world missions at Gordon-Conwell, said evangelicals have no desire to impose Christianity on unwilling Americans. He insisted conservative Christians can be respectful of other religions -- without abandoning their own core teaching that all faiths are not equal.

"We want an open discourse where we have the right and freedom to share our faith," Tennent said. "I want to protect the right for a Buddhist to be a Buddhist in America. I want to protect the right for a Muslim to be a Muslim in America. ... But I still want them to know Christ."

Major divisions

While people outside the evangelical movement often view it as monolithic, major divisions exist, including disagreement over which moral and public policy issues should be paramount. Some speakers said evangelicals too closely align themselves with Republicans and focus too much on abortion and gay marriage, instead of broad social concerns.

Estimates of the number of evangelicals in the United States vary dramatically -- from 44 million up to 126 million -- depending on how broad a definition is used, according to Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell.

Robert Wenz, of the National Association of Evangelicals, whose member churches say they represent 24 million people, drew a sharp distinction between organizations like his and the Moral Majority, which was started by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

While Falwell deserves credit for re-energizing Christians politically, the Moral Majority was "fatally flawed," and its emergence as a representative of conservative Christianity was "regrettable," Wenz said.

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

John Jefferson Davis, a professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Gordon-Conwell, said it was understandable that non-Christians now view evangelicals as at the peak of their influence, given that an outspoken Christian is in the White House and Republicans responsive to Christian concerns control Congress.

Still, conservative Christian values face wholesale rejection in other arenas, such as the entertainment industry, while evangelicals continue to lose major court battles over abortion and religion in public schools, Davis said.

"We acknowledge as evangelicals that we're in a culture war," Wenz said, "but the war is against a movement that seeks to impose a totally secular world view."

David Wells, professor of historical and systematic theology at the seminary, said some of the trouble stems from a tendency to equate evangelicals with fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are cultural separatists, withdrawing from people who hold different beliefs and adopting "a set of cultural attitudes that evangelicals have abandoned," he said. Evangelicals seek to involve themselves in society, engaging members of other religions and influencing the broader culture.

"Race, poverty and the environment are, or should be part of, our biblically based ethic," Davis said.

Wenz added that evangelicals have little support among conservative black Christians. The lack of white evangelical involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s "continues to be an embarrassing failure from which we have not recovered," Wenz said.

"The word evangelical is not popular in the black evangelical community," he said.

The speakers said they were not surprised by the public's wariness of evangelicals, as membership in conservative Christian churches explodes around the world and evangelicals build alliances with the politically powerful. However, Wenz said evangelicals desire many of the same things as other Americans: free speech and help for the disadvantaged in society.

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On the Net:

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary: http://www.gordonconwell.edu/

National Association of Evangelicals: http://www.nae.net/