Comments on: Cultural Thursday

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:05:05 +0000

I imagine conservative politicians will be taking up much different issues for the next election, now that they have sufficiently lost the big class of Jerry Falwell’s; Evangelicalism is no longer trendy, and it has largely been snuffed out as a blind wave of shouting with no intellectual defense. Sure we’ll still hear Evangelical voices, but the landscape is going to break up into smaller pieces. I think this gesture is just marking a much hazier future. I would suffice it to say that the political horizon is drastically changing, and we might even see a new party receive more attention than usual. Conservatives and liberals, as long as they maintain their identity as “conservatives” and “liberals” can’t get along, because their very identity depends on their ideals. I would simply expect to see some new classes pop up and for the liberal and conservative categories to take a much different form. But who knows… I’m definitely no authority on the issue.

By: kylereed

kylereed — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:56:54 +0000

Interesting thoughts here Brad. I really do think that you are right when you talk about the blurriness of lines. It is pretty obvious that Obama is trying to “reach out” to all sides and if you watched the CNN debate that I put up was very interesting to see the argument over the fact that this idea of warren praying was not uniting the country.
I see what you are saying about the term Evangelical Christian Right not being a label anymore. But what I have noticed here at CHS and at Harvester is that it is still in affect. I would say that Harvester was what seemed to be 80% leaning to the right side and against Obama. And yet we had a minister at Harvester vote for Obama. So the lines I really think are being blurred in the sense that the majority is switching.
I wonder though if the “conservatives” and “liberals” will ever get along on these issues?

By: Brad Nichols

Brad Nichols — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:36:46 +0000

Warren wasn’t a surprise to me, and I don’t think he was much of a surprise to the rest of the Christian community. The convenient label of the “Evangelical Christian Right” is no longer effectively in place any more. It’s just a 1990′s straw man that non-Christian and Christian liberals erect for the sake of avoiding the more intellectual arguments that need to be treated. Obama received more votes from Evangelicals than any other Democratic candidate, and the rest of the Evangelical community was torn on much bigger issues than abortion. To lump even a majority of the Christian right into that misinformed category is to miss the real debate.
Obama picked Warren along with many other homosexual activists, because it was a gesture that his administration would reach much further past the simplistic divides between conservative and liberal circles. The gesture was important though, and, understandably, people were up in arms for a variety of reasons. He’s not merely calling a Christian celebrity to pray; he’s expecting a new cultural identity to take shape between two already staunchly different cultures. For some reason, the new Christian movements want to blur all these categorizations, as if they aren’t important… And they very much are important to maintain. You can not have sanity without identity, and you can not have identity without defining yourself denominationally.