Pleading Their Cause

Nicholas Kristof deemed conservative, evangelical Christians the new internationalists. This is true. American evangelicals have been at the forefront of fighting for peace and justice from the African continent to Southeast Asia. A new article in the Christian Science Monitor takes a closer look at evangelical foreign policy activism. A Christian woman from Midland, Texas brought the genocide in Sudan to the attention of the White House. Numerous groups including International Justice Mission (founded by evanglical Gary Haugen) fight sex-trafficking. Evangelical Christians including Charles Colson and Richard Land worked with others to bring about the landmark International Regligous Freedom Act of 1998 which protected the millions who are persecuted and stand to be persecuted for their religious beliefs. And then there is the response of conservative Christians to tsunamis and earthquakes--bringing in millions of dollars worth of food and supplies. Allen Hertzke, director of religous studies at the University of Oklahoma, wrote a well-respected book titled Freeing God's Children. In it, he discusses how evangelical Christians have formed ties with unlikely allies, including feminists and Jews, to help secure global human rights for the oppressed.

The point of this is not to trump up evangelicals. Rather the point is to defend a worldview that has come under scrutiny by the media and the Religous Left. Critics sometimes claim that evangelicals only care about forcing a theocracy on America or oppressing gays and thus don't care about the poor or the sick (for a glimpse of these critiques read Talk2Action**warning, there is rampant paranoia on that site**).

The facts tell a completely different story. For example, liberal Christians in America denied reports of persecution in China, because they had believed the government line that as long as Christians registered with the government, they would be free to worship. These liberal Christians justified registration as a legitimate national security measure for China. A blind eye was turned from the persecuted in China by the Religious Left. Similarly, the NCC aligned itself with the state operated church in North Korea. The government used the NCC to defend its human rights record. North Korea sent a letter to the NCC thanking the organization for its support of an international effort toward peace and denouncing the unfair and unjust actions of America. Hertzke writes,

“when many liberal Protestant leaders took a left turn on foreign policy from
the 1960s anti-Vietnam effort onward, they mirrored views of the secular
Left. The National Council of Churches, for example, moved from a position
of publicly criticizing the purges and religious persecution in the Soviet Union
and it satellites in Eastern Europe in the 1950s to a posture of rather
benevolent ‘silent diplomacy’ toward totalitarian regimes” (Hertzke 100).

The NCC demonstrated further ineptness toward human rights when it praised the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution as having won a “Communist victory” and applauded the Chinese government for “working for the interests of the ordinary people” (Hertzke 100). The NCC saw the movement of the Religious Right to help persecuted Christians as a “muscular Christianity” and an “attitude of Christian superiority that not only led to the Inquisition but eventually to the Nazi Holocaust” (Hertzke 101).

Evangelicals should take heart in knowing that much is being done in Jesus' name to wipe out injustice throughout the world. Evangelicals also ought to take this as a call to do more "to act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God."