National Association of Evangelicals

• Apparently Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell got "'many good ideas" from his official state visit to Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado.
• Someone should ask Gov. Bob McDonnell if Pat Robertson will be attending his "thank you retreat".
• The Senate Judiciary Committee voted out Robert Chatigny’s nomination today - Concerned Women for America responded by saying "Senators Should Reject Obama's 'Empathy for Sadists' Judge".
• Speaking of CWA, they are very upset about President Obama's salty language.
• For all their screaming and yelling, Religious Right groups don't appear to have generated much opposition to repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
• Bryan Fischer bravely attacks the National Association of Evangelicals for supporting immigration reform while conveniently failing to attack right-wing leaders like Mat Staver, Richard Land, and Ken Blackwell, who also support it.
• Finally, the quote of the day from Michael Pakaluk explaining why he doesn't want the children of gay couples attending Catholic school with his children: "The third reason is that it seemed a real danger that the boy being raised by the same-sex couple would bring to school something obscene or pornographic, or refer to such things in conversation, as they go along with the same-sex lifestyle, which--as not being related to procreation-- is inherently eroticized and pornographic. He might expose other children to such things, as he might easily have encountered them in his household."

This call for healthcare reform to provide coverage to those who may be in the country illegally is quite interesting:

America's largest Hispanic Christian Organization, The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), The Hispanic National Association of Evangelicals, expressed disappointment and warned of continued polarization as a result of the recent incorporation of anti-immigrant rhetoric within the current Health Care debate.

"The Hispanic National Association of Evangelicals believes our nation needs Health Care Reform that reconciles affordability and accessibility with the protection of life, conscience, personal and religious liberties. We encourage all members of Congress to debate this issue with integrity, humility, and respect. Health Care reform is a matter of Social Justice driven by a moral imperative that is undeniable. The fact that millions of Americans lack health care coverage is unacceptable", declared Dr. Gilbert Velez, NHCLC Chairman and President of the Hispanic Mega Church Association.

Hispanic Evangelicals are reacting to rhetoric recently incorporated by both parties declaring that a proof of citizenship requirement will be included in Heath Care Reform proposals prohibiting undocumented families access to coverage.

"Correspondingly, we find it to be both morally and politically disadvantageous not to include coverage for all those currently residing in our nation. To require immigrants to prove citizenship in order to purchase Health Care coverage stands as a defacto endorsement of racial profiling and continues to exacerbate the anti-immigrant sentiment currently embedded within the immigration reform debate", explained Rev. Nick Garza, Conference Chief Operating Officer.

"To exclude the opportunity for working families to purchase coverage will place over 12 million homes in a precarious situation. This is deportation via attrition or better yet, some may label the scheme as Xenophobic Health Care Reform. We call upon all the White House, Congress and faith advocates to respectfully address this matter from the platform of Leviticus 19 as we are admonished to treat the strangers among us as one of our own", added Garza.

The reason it is so interesting is that the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference also happens to be a member of the new right-wing supergroup The Freedom Federation, which has recently begun speaking out on the issue of healthcare reform.

To date, the Federation has not publicly taken a position on the issue of coverage for illegal immigrants, but given that this idea is a fundamental non-starter for most conservative and right-wing groups, it'll be interesting to see how the coalition tries to finesse this issue ... especially considering that the Eagle Forum is likewise a member:

Eagle Forum, a conservative public policy organization founded by Phyllis Schlafly, encourages town hall meeting attendees to be more vocal about the deliberately-placed loopholes in both the House and Senate health care bills which will allow illegal immigrants to apply for and receive health insurance coverage. ... Eagle Forum continues to encourage American citizens to attend their district and state town hall meetings and to urge their elected officials to oppose any attempts at a stealth health care amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Earlier this week we mentioned the recent colum by Kathleen Parker, who used a small feud between Focus on the Family and right-wing radio host Steve Deace to proclaim that the Religious Right was "finished as a political entity."

Needless to say, this did not sit well with Tom Minnery, senior vice president of Focus on the Family Action, who has now taken to the page of (where else?) WorldNetDaily to set her and everyone else straight:

Parker's animus is as puzzling as her myopia. Unlike many reporters, she has never visited, never phoned, never gained her information firsthand, never sought out our side of any issue. She is content to shoot from a great distance, always with second and third-hand information.

No wonder she misses so badly.

Minnery defends James Dobson's and Focus's support of John McCain on the gorunds that they really had no other option in the face of "the almost viciously pro-abortion positions of Obama" and then takes issue with the supposed divide between younger evangelicals who care about things like poverty and global warming and old-guard figures like Dobson who only care about abortion and gays, saying that it is groups like Focus really represent the agenda of the evangelical voters in America:

One reporter went so far in an interview with me as to point out that two evangelical leaders who emphasize these newer issues have been leaders at two conservative religious organizations, Richard Cizik at the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Joel Hunter at the Christian Coalition.

She missed her own point. These men "have been" leaders. Neither is in his role today, precisely because these organizations got fed up with so much emphasis on these issues. They are not unimportant matters, but they will have secondary influence as long as the unborn are killed in their mothers' wombs and as long as the definition of marriage is threatened. These are the problems that motivate most evangelicals to engage politics. Mike Huckabee did not win the Iowa caucuses by talking about the polar ice caps. He did it by emphasizing marriage, faith and the pro-life cause.

And by the way, At Focus on the Family we believe we fight poverty every day by teaching people how to keep their marriages intact. It's how we spend 90 percent of our income, and the failure of the intact family is a leading cause of poverty in our country. Like many reporters, this one wasn't convinced. If it's not a government program, it's not a poverty program.

In their haste to pronounce us dead, reporters routinely ignore the most profound grass-roots uprising of our era, the writing of marriage definitions into 30 state constitutions. That's 30 victories in all 30 states that have put this question to voters, and many of those victories have been landslides. This has been a continental phenomenon, from the Midwest, through the South, the Intermountain West, and the Left Coast states of Oregon and (shudder!) sophisticated California. The marriage movement lags only in the older states of the Eastern seaboard, which do not permit citizen initiatives.

And here is the most ignored fact of all. In nearly every marriage amendment state, the action was led by organizations nurtured to life by Focus on the Family's James Dobson, who the media routinely offer up as exhibit A, the T-Rex of Jurassic Park.

If Minnery sounds bitter, it's mainly because he is sick of being written off every few years, saying that "with nearly every election cycle now come the somber reports in the news media of the death of the Religious Right. In the 20 years I've been in the movement, we have died four times."

We don't agree with Minnery on much, but we can understand his frustration - because we are equally tired to having to keep making this same point.

It was just yesterday that I was just asking "how many more times [Richard] Cizik can get away with repudiating and alienating the traditional Religious Right movement and its agenda before the powers-that-be at the National Association of Evangelicals finally succumb to the pressure and fire him."

Apparently, the answer was zero more times:

Richard Cizik has resigned as Vice President of Governmental Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). His resignation, which takes effect today, concludes 28 years of service and leadership in the Washington, DC office of NAE.

Over the past three decades he has been a tireless advocate for a broad variety of issues important to the evangelical community including passage of anti-persecution legislation, laws against human trafficking, nurture of family life, protection of children, justice and compassion for the poor and vulnerable, sanctity of human life, opposition to abortion on demand, peace and the restraint of violence in our world, creation care and others. He gave leadership to the writing and implementation to the landmark document, For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.

Leith Anderson, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, explained in a letter to the members of the board of directors of NAE that “in a December 2, 2008 broadcast interview on National Public Radio, Richard responded to questions and made statements that did not appropriately represent the values and convictions of NAE and our constituents. Although he has subsequently expressed regret, apologized and affirmed our values there is a loss of trust in his credibility as a spokesperson among leaders and constituents.”

Earlier this week, we noted that Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals wasn’t making any friends on the Right by blasting John McCain for completely selling out to them.  It looks like Cizik has no fear of rubbing salt in the wound, telling Dan Gilgoff that the Religious Right’s party-line commitment to the GOP is “unbiblical. It says you don't think. If you're simply voting on same sex marriage and abortion, you're not thinking. What I'm saying is that a lot of evangelicals don't think, sad to say.”

But more interesting, especially in light of the fact that Rob Schenck and the Family Research Council are accusing Barack Obama of snubbing evangelicals, is the fact that, according to Cizik, the McCain campaign is completely snubbing the NAE and other leaders:

The McCain campaign has beefed up its religious outreach efforts recently. How is their evangelical outreach going?

We put in a request with the McCain campaign and it was never responded to. Many figures in the Republican Party have reached out to the campaign stating their concern that the candidate has not reached out to evangelical leaders, but it went nowhere. And since we're so deep into the campaign, we can only assume that we're not going to get an answer. We had some people, including a governor and a major party official, who said to the campaign, "I think you should meet with some of these evangelicals." I have subsequently interpreted that they didn't think they needed to because they had an idea of their own and that maybe that was Sarah Palin.

Has the Obama campaign reached out to the National Association of Evangelicals?

We put in a request and an answer came back rather quickly: They wanted us to come to a meeting in Chicago with some 25 other leaders. And I went. One is left to conclude that the McCain people have concluded that they don't need such a meeting.

With the passing of right-wing luminaries such as Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy in recent months, coupled with the aging of many of the Right’s traditional leaders, the movement itself appears to be in flux and some are getting worried about just what will become of it in the future.  Just last week, James Dobson voiced these concerns while addressing the National Religious Broadcasters Convention:

“It causes me to wonder who will be left to carry the banner when this generation of leaders is gone. The question is, will the younger generation heed the call? Who will defend the unborn child in the years to come? Who will plead for the Terri Schiavos of the world? Who’s going to fight for the institution of marriage, which is on the ropes today.”

The emerging conventional wisdom is that the Religious Right is on the verge of being replaced by a “new evangelical” movement that shares the old-guard’s opposition to gays and abortion, but also cares about issues like poverty and the environment.  The standard-bearer of this “new breed” is Mike Huckabee who, as he puts it, drinks “a different kind of Jesus juice” than the traditional leaders and routinely says things like this: 

I don’t see [the right-wing movement] going into decline. I see it going into a maturing process. I think the issues are going to broaden and force Evangelicals to expand their horizons of concerns to poverty, disease, issues of education and homelessness. These are issues that I think are going to become increasingly important along with the environment as part of an overall focus that you’re going to see from - I would use a broader term - values voters - that would include not only Evangelicals but also Catholics and conservative Jewish voters as well.

Of course, just because a bunch of young upstarts think that caring about the environment is important doesn’t mean that the old-guard has any interest in broadening their agenda.  As we noted last year, when the National Association of Evangelicals started to voice concerns about the environment and global warming, right-wing stalwarts like Dobson, Tony Perkins, Don Wildmon, Gary Bauer, Rick Scarborough, and Paul Weyrich dashed off an angry letter essentially demanding that the NAE fire its own Vice President over it.

The NAE didn’t back down, but the Right didn’t give up.  Instead, they formed their own organization, the American Environmental Coalition, and now seek "to bring balance to the debate by being an alternative source of reliable information to Americans who seek the best way forward for our country.” 

In October, a group of 138 Muslim scholars, clerics and intellectuals came together to issue an open letter entitled “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a statement that sought to declare common ground between Christianity and Islam.

A short time later, the Yale Center for Faith and Culture issued a response that was signed by 100 Christian theologians and ministers that welcomed the effort, stating:

Given the deep fissures in the relations between Christians and Muslims today, the task before us is daunting. And the stakes are great. The future of the world depends on our ability as Christians and Muslims to live together in peace. If we fail to make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony you correctly remind us that “our eternal souls” are at stake as well.

We are persuaded that our next step should be for our leaders at every level to meet together and begin the earnest work of determining how God would have us fulfill the requirement that we love God and one another. It is with humility and hope that we receive your generous letter, and we commit ourselves to labor together in heart, soul, mind and strength for the objectives you so appropriately propose.

Guess who is not happy about it?

An attempt by leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to win friends and influence Muslims is alienating another group — evangelical Christians.

Reactions have been negative and strong. Islam expert Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo has called it a “betrayal” and a “sellout.” Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary (Southern Baptist), termed it “naiveté that borders on dishonesty.”

…

Mohler said the agreement “sends the wrong signal” and contains basic theological problems, especially in “marginalizing” Jesus Christ. He also condemned the apology for the Crusades.

“I just have to wonder how intellectually honest this is,” he said. “Are these people suggesting that they wish the military conflict with Islam had ended differently — that Islam had conquered Europe?”

…

Gary Bauer, president of the Campaign for Working Families, told CitizenLink the NAE leaders “have left the (card) table without their pants — that is, they’ve been taken and may not even realize they’ve been taken.”

…

Sookhdeo called for Christian leaders who signed the letter to withdraw their names, saying the confession of guilt puts Christian communities in Muslim areas of the world at risk.

“I find it difficult to understand how senior evangelical leaders in the West can join hands with other Christians who actually are betraying the Christian faith (and) their Christian brothers and sisters in the Muslim world,” he said.

No word yet on whether this right-wing leaders will try to get Richard Cizik fired from his position with NEA for signing this letter, as they did a while back when he dared to care about the environment.  

In a column mulling the role of Evangelicals in the 2008 election, Bishop Harry Jackson claims that in recent years, they “voted their values” based on “gay marriage and pro-life concerns” – an assumption contradicted by the Center for American Values poll – but that now the Evangelical movement is undergoing a “political makeover.” One might guess that Jackson was referring to the dispute between the National Association of Evangelicals and religious-right activists (including Jackson) led by James Dobson over whether talking about climate change and torture distracts from the core mission of Christians. Instead, Jackson – who is a frequent Religious Right spokesman – sees that debate as part of a liberal conspiracy to undermine “the historic passion that the ‘moral majority’ has had for the issues of protection of life and guarding the traditional family”:

During this transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, a host of enemies are attempting to prevent an evangelical resurrection. A sophisticated, pincer strategy is being waged against them by two groups--–liberal Christians and the liberal press. Both groups fear that the sleeping giant will awaken with an attitude.

Of course, this concern by the Dobson group that outreach on alternate issues would distract from gay marriage, abortion, and abstinence education was not voiced during and after the last election, as the Religious Right’s definition of core issues of so-called “values voters” rapidly expanded to encompass most of the Republican Party platform, from the War on Terror to tax cuts and Social Security to a fear of “socialized medicine.”

So it is that the religious-right activists most closely aligned with partisan campaigns have made discrediting the National Association of Evangelicals a priority. One more example comes from Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a group founded in the early 1980s to counter criticism of Reagan Administration policies in Central America by the National Council of Churches and to create an ideological “renewal” in mainline protestant churches by painting the NCC as Communist sympathizers. Tooley invokes the IRD’s defining campaign against the National Council of Churches in describing the National Association of Evangelicals:

It seems as if James Dobson and his cronies are suddenly getting very concerned about the threat of global warming - not the threat it poses to the environment and humanity, mind you, but the threat it poses to their own political empire. 

So concerned are the likes of Dobson, Tony Perkins, Don Wildmon, Gary Bauer, Rick Scarborough, Paul Weyrich, Harry Jackson, and others that they have taken it upon themselves to write a letter (PDF) to the National Association of Evangelicals demanding that it fire its own Vice President for Governmental Affairs, Richard Cizik, and cease and desist caring about global warming:

Although we, the undersigned, are not members of the National Association of Evangelicals, our organizations interface with it regularly and consider it to be an important Christian institution in today’s culture. From that perspective, we are writing the Board of Directors to call attention to what we perceive as a threat to the unity and integrity of the Association.

Despite the fact that not one of the signers is even a member of the NAE, they still feel justified in complaining about NEA’s work on global warming.  Why?  Because they fear it is undermining their own anti-choice, anti-gay agenda:

More importantly, we have observed that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.

Because of this audacious offense, Dobson and his ilk have decreed that Cizik must go: 

We implore the NAE board to ensure that Mr. Cizik faithfully represents the policies and commitments of the organization, including its defense of traditional values. If he cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals on environmental issues, then we respectfully suggest that he be encouraged to resign his position with the NAE.

Maybe this was the sort of thing Dick Armey had in mind a few months ago when he said “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.”