Christian Citizenship - links
They’d Rather Switch Than Fight
There’s a bonus in all this for social conservatives. Switchers on social issues usually stay switched. Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush did so after becoming pro-lifers. All those Democratic presidential candidates in the 1980s and 1990s who switched sides on abortion from pro-life to pro-choice have stayed put. Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, says you only get to flip once on social issues. If you switch back, “you’re in no man’s land,” a politician without a political base.
Mar 5, 2007
Topic: Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, National, Social Issues
BARNA : Who Qualifies As An Evangelical?
January 18, 2007
(Ventura, CA) – The media and social commentators frequently refer to surveys that describe the opinions and behavior of “evangelicals.” However, those analyses are based on surveys that ask adults whether or not they consider themselves to be an evangelical. For two decades, The Barna Group has been measuring the social, political, religious and behavioral characteristics of evangelicals as well – but using a substantially different set of criteria. The Barna Group’s nine questions pertaining to the spiritual beliefs of people have reported on a very different – and much smaller – group of people. To distinguish them from the self-described evangelicals, Barna has named the segment based on its answers to nine theological factors the “9-point evangelicals.”
Jan 22, 2007
Topic: Faith, Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, National
RADIO - Global Warming
Dr. Barrett Duke Guests hosts Richard Land Live! on Saturday January 6, 2007
Updated Jan 24, 2007 to point to the FFF version of the broadcast.
Jan 6, 2007
Topic: Family, Sexual Purity, Homosexuality, Life, Cloning, Stem-Cell Research, Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Human Rights, Legislation, War, Science, Bioethics, Environment
Newsweek Blog: Is America A ‘Christian Nation’?
BELOW TEXT IS FOR RECORD ONLY, NOT FOR PUBLICATION. NEWSWEEK OWNS EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO THIS CONTENT
Religious Americans Want Views Welcomed in Public Square
It is both inaccurate historically and inappropriate theologically to describe America as a “Christian nation.”
Historically, America was an attempt to establish a nation based broadly on Judeo-Christian values (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”) and Enlightenment ideas of self-government. In 1798, John Adams, the nation’s second president, said, “Our Constitution was made for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
Theologically, a “Christian nation,” at least for Evangelical Christians, implies a nation where the vast majority of people are “converted” individuals who profess Christ as their personal Savior, a situation which has never been true in the United States, even when more than 90 percent of the population identified with some form of Protestant Christianity in 1790.
Lastly, one must make the distinction between “nation” and “government.” The nation encompasses the people and the society as a whole, as opposed to the government, which is merely the governing authority.
Most religious Americans believe in a secular government under the rubric of the First Amendment, but desire a religiously pluralistic, as opposed to a secular, society in which religiously informed viewpoints are welcomed in the public square on an equal basis with all other voices.
Posted by Richard Land on December 14, 2006 10:30 AM
Dec 15, 2006
Topic: Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Church and State, Religious Liberty
CNN - What is a Christian? (T-script)
CNN
ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES
What is a Christian?; New Moral Values; Evangelicals and Israel; End of Days; Capitalist Christian; The Seekers
Aired December 14, 2006 – 23:00 ET
As expert guests, Anderson will talk to Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Jim Wallis, author of “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It” and president of Sojourners, a progressive Christian ministry, along with Dwight Hopkins, a professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Dec 15, 2006
Topic: Faith, Bible, Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Church and State, Religious Liberty, Social Issues
God’s Country?
Walter Russell Mead
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006
Summary: Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country’s political scene — with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines.
Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Further reading for this article can be found at www.foreignaffairs.org/mead_reading.
Dec 12, 2006
Topic: Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Human Rights, Persecution, Religious Liberty, War
TIME: Can a Mormon be President?
TIME Magazine
By MIKE ALLEN
Posted Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006
A mormon church official and a public relations executive shuttled recently from the Fox News Washington bureau to the Washington Post to the online political digest the Hotline. The two were engaging in a little pre-emptive rearguard action, gearing up for the impending Republican presidential campaign of Massachusetts Governor (Willard) Mitt Romney, 59, whose family has long been part of the church’s élite.
Nov 26, 2006
Topic: Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Church and State
WA Post: The Gospel According to Jim Wallis
Washington Post Magazine
By David Paul Kuhn
Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page W2
JIM WALLIS IS PREACHING ABOUT A BIBLE TORN APART. Wallis tells the crowd at the Seattle Pacific University chapel that when he was in seminary, a fellow student took hold of an old Bible and cut out “every single reference to the poor.”
“And when we were done, that Bible was literally in shreds. It was falling apart in my hands. It was a Bible full of holes. I would take it out to preach and say, ‘Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible.’”
Nov 26, 2006
Topic: Faith, Apologetics, Bible, Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Church and State, Social Issues, War
Reagan’s 1986 Election
Conservatives have bounced back from electoral setbacks before.
WSJ Opinion Journal
BY JEFFREY LORD
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
As Ronald Reagan was thanking me I was both depressed and embarrassed.
It was November, 1986. After a solid two years of effort, the Congressional elections in the sixth year of the Reagan presidency had gone badly.
The 1980 Reagan landslide over Jimmy Carter had produced twelve new Republican Senate seats, giving the GOP a Senate majority for the first time since 1954. It made the Senate a critical ally for Reagan as he set about rebuilding the nation’s military, getting forward-looking young conservatives onto the federal bench and passing the landmark tax cuts needed to revitalize an almost crippled economy. The House was more problematical. A bastion of liberal Democrats with a mindset still stuck somewhere between1935 and 1965 on economics. Its more outspoken members loved reliving their glory days opposing the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon.
Oct 17, 2006
Topic: Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, Legislation, National, Social Issues, Issues
Evangelicals Blame Foley, Not Republican Party
As word of Representative Mark Foley’s sexually explicit e-mail messages to former pages spread last week, Republican strategists worried — and Democrats hoped — that the sordid nature of the scandal would discourage conservative Christians from going to the polls. But in dozens of interviews here in southeastern Virginia, a conservative Christian stronghold that is a battleground in races for the House and Senate, many said the episode only reinforced their reasons to vote for their two Republican incumbents in neck-and-neck re-election fights, Representative Thelma Drake and Senator George Allen.
Oct 9, 2006
Topic: Faith, Family, Citizenship, Christian Citizenship, National