(Re)Discovering the evangelical mind

Every so often someone in the popular press will make the apparently earth-shattering discovery that evangelical Christians can actually think and are not, after all, "poor, uneducated and easy to command," as journalist Michael Weisskopf notoriously put it nearly two decades ago. The latest example of this discovery appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jonathan Fitzgerald called "Winning Not Just Hearts but Minds." The subtitle does more than hint at where the article will go: "Evangelicals move, slowly, toward the intellectual life."

Read more at Comment’s website.

Abortion reduction

Last year around this time, when a number of prominent evangelicals were claiming to have toned down the Democratic Party's pro-choice policy, I expressed scepticism and wondered whether they had allowed themselves to be taken advantage of with nothing to show in return. My genial, if curmudgeonly, friend Keith Pavlischek says yes and cites concrete evidence that the Obama administration has no intention of pursuing an abortion-reduction strategy, despite the claims of Jim Wallis and others to the contrary: Ceding the Common Ground on Abortion.

It is one thing to recognize that politics is the art of the possible, as Bismarck is reputed to have said. Like it or not, involvement in the political process necessarily entails accepting compromise and settling for what one observer has called proximate justice. It is quite another, however, to yield ground so totally on an issue of importance, to receive nothing in the exchange, and then to claim the opposite. This comes close, if not to outright deception (I prefer to be charitable here), then to something approaching acute political ineptitude.

Have Democrats softened on abortion?

Back in the 1980s many of us had good reason to think that the Reaganite Republican Party was co-opting evangelicals and Catholics by giving lip service to the pro-life position. A quarter-century later, are Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo and others being used by the Democrats to bring evangelicals on side? Wallis waxes enthusiastic about the party's supposedly changed platform during this election year: A Step Forward on Abortion. But pro-choice Judith Warner is unpersuaded: Walking the Abortion Plank.

At least the Republicans gave lip service; the Democrats have thrown not even so much as a few crumbs at pro-lifers. Then again, I suppose we have to remind ourselves that Wallis himself, despite his claimed consistent life ethic, is ultimately pro-choice.

The danger of sects

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa is the preacher for the papal household at the Vatican. In this sermon for the 4th sunday of Easter, he warns against the influence of sects: Sheep that go astray. Though the current Pope is often thought to be a conservative, especially on ecclesiological and liturgical matters, his official preacher refrains from assigning the sectarian label to all Christians outside the Roman fold:

When we speak of sects, we must be careful not to put everything on the same level. Protestant evangelicals and Pentecostals, for example, apart from isolated groups, are not sects. For years the Catholic Church has maintained an official dialogue with them, something that it would never do with sects.

The true sects can be recognized by certain characteristics. First of all, in regard to their creed, they do not share essential points with the Christian faith, such as the divinity of Christ and the Trinity; or rather they mix foreign and incompatible elements with Christian doctrines -- re-incarnation, for example. In regard to methods, they are literally “sheep stealers” in the sense that they try to take the faithful away from their Church of origin, to make them followers of their sect.

The other day one of my colleagues alerted me to this group: the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity. Judging from Gretta Vosper's account of what her group believes — or rather, does not believe — it is safe to say that it would quite nicely qualify as a sect, using Fr. Cantalamessa's criteria. One assumes then that a Catholic-Progressive Christian dialogue will not be convened any time soon.

Swimming the Tiber

Here is a name that, admittedly, I had not known before, but this news is making waves in evangelical circles: Evangelical professor becomes Catholic. Christianity Today's David Neff interviews Francis Beckwith about his reconversion and the unexpected reverberations. Here's Beckwith himself on My Return to the Catholic Church. All of this reminds me of the fuss made over Tom Howard's reception into the Roman Catholic Church back in 1985. After reading such stories, I keep coming back to this question: Why Rome and not Constantinople?