Christians Who Won't Toe the Line

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Evangelical Protestantism in the United States is going through a New Reformation that is disentangling a great religious movement from a partisan political machine. This historic change will require liberals and conservatives alike to abandon their sometimes narrow views of who evangelicals are.

The reformers won an important victory this month when the board of the National Association of Evangelicals faced down right-wing partisans and reaffirmed its view that solving global warming was an important moral cause. In so doing, it also expressed confidence in the Rev. Rich Cizik, the NAE's vice president for governmental affairs....
What makes this fight strange is that Cizik is no liberal. On the contrary, he supported Ronald Reagan twice and George W. Bush twice. He is still proud of his role in drafting the invitation to Reagan that led to the former president's 1983 speech before the NAE calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire."

"We should be primarily concerned with what the Gospel says," Cizik insists, "not whether you're getting off some political train." Those are the words of a New Reformation. Many evangelicals are boarding a new train. It runs along tracks defined by the broad demands of their faith, not by some party's political agenda.

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Since 1980, white evangelical Christians have been seen primarily as a Republican voting bloc. They delivered more than three-quarters of their ballots to President Bush in the 2004 election.

That is no accident. In 1979, a group of conservative activists led by Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and Morton Blackwell, a Republican National Committee member from Virginia, went to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, urging him to organize what became the Moral Majority.

Their primary goal was not religious but political: to enlist evangelicals behind conservative Republican candidates. Blackwell candidly called evangelicals "the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape." The activists reaped a mighty load.

The Christian Coalition was equally political in its inspiration. Emerging from Pat Robertson's unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, it sought to advance his influence in the party.