Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
February 3, 2008
New York Times

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Having originated on the political left (with its democratic, liberal, and progressive perspectives), those working in the conflict and, especially, peace fields tend to fall into the stereotypes that they preach against and conclude that people on the right side of the political spectrum could not possibly be interested in promoting peace. This helps explain why the movement has never to enjoyed the kind of broad political support required for success. In this article, Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times, makes a compelling argument that there is enormous potential for an alliance (or at least mutually supporting efforts) between evangelicals and liberals.

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At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama's race or Hillary Clinton's sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee's religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives. And the Democratic presidential candidate (particularly if it's Mr. Obama, to whom evangelicals have been startlingly receptive) has a real chance this year of winning large numbers of evangelical voters.

The rest of the article is available from the New York Times.