Posted on 01/26/2012 10:21:22 AM PST by C19fan
From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin provides an iconoclastic new history of the entrance of evangelical Christians into national American politics. Examining the key players of the “Religious Right” — Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and many others — D. G. Hart argues that evangelicalism is (and always has been) a bad fit with classic political conservatism.
Hart shows how the uneasy alliance of these unlikely political bedfellows has contributed directly to the fragmentation of today’s conservative movement. He contends that the ongoing burden of reconciling the progressive moral idealism of religious conservatives with the sober realism of political conservatives increasingly threatens this precarious partnership. Moreover, Hart suggests that evangelicals are unlikely to remain politically conservative in the long term unless they stop looking to big government to solve societal woes at home and abroad and at last embrace classic small-government conservatism for its own sake.
(Excerpt) Read more at amazon.com ...
Are you kidding me? I guess this guy just thinks Christians should shut up and sit down?
Nah, Hart, don’t worry about those ‘GOD’ fearing evangelicals, you all are hip deep now in Sodom and Gomorrah, the perverts are the best at what they do. Enjoy your trip down the sewer.
I see three basic choices:
1) Abandon God and embrace smaller government.
2) Abandon smaller government and embrace the Social Gospel and Compassionate Conservatism.
3) Keep doing what I’m going: Accept Jesus as my savior, and vote for politicians who want to shrink government.
Not a tough choice.
This is really nonsense.
If you define “conservative” as a Constitutional conservative, there is no “bad fit,” and the ideas of this book seem like an artificial attempt to create a wedge.
No, what he is saying that Social Conservatives usually embrace Big Government when Big Government does what they want it to do. So he is not saying shut up and sit down, he is saying that they should keep their hands out of other peoples pockets.
Sounds like just another liberaltarian who’s mad that Christians oppose abortion and gay marriage. I think I’ll pass on this book, unless I can find at a yard sale for a quarter, and need something to level out a washing machine.
Which is ironic, since Santorum is Catholic, and not an Evangelical.
This is not an honest attempt to communicate with either Conservatives or Christians.
I’ve been waiting for someone to point that out. Of course, there are evangelical Catholics, but Santorum isn’t one of them.
Any other time, they would be lambasting Santorum for being Catholic.
That is an idiot observation.
Name me ONE THING that SoCons advocate that would lead anyone to think they have their hands in the pockets of big government.
No, he is pointing out that using government to accomplish social ends (reduction of sinning and increase in virtue) or give to the poor, care for the sick, etc., is a bad idea. Somewhat like taking your hands off the wheel to go after the fly buzzing around in your car. You are probably not going to get rid of the fly, but most likely total your car.
And I agree with him. Even if we were to get a government large enough to stuff the queers back into the closet, enforce Sabbath Laws, get every hop head and alkie into a work farm until they reform, and all that worked — how long would it be before we got a government that decided church going, tithing, homeschooling or foreign missions were bad and made those illegal?
People sin. Its been in our make-up since Chapter 3 of Genesis. Even God Himself has a really bad track record of legislating morality and took a thousand years and some really harsh punishments to make his point — we are incapable of living a sinless life. Then he sent the Solution and we personally were tasked with feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and caring for the sick.
You want a quiet moment in church? Just ask the congregation when the last time they visited a prison or fed the homeless, visited an old folks home, or spent a lousy hour playing a board game with a sick child in a pedriatric cancer ward. Christians should be paying a lot more attention to doing those things than trying figure out how to get somebody else to take care of of the icky people...You know, the “other” children of God.
This guy is a an example of why Goldwater really lost, and why Reagan won. Goldwater angered the evangelicals while Reagan embraced them. Establishment Republicans have always shunned cultural conservatives, those people who care about life, immigration policies, the expansion of pedophilia and the gay agenda, homeschooling, the 2nd Amendment, government plundering and debt, and the world our children will inherit from us. Progressive Republicans can’t have their quasi-conservative, indebted, immoral big government, because the Christian base won’t shut up.
School vouchers.
Subsidzed prescription drugs for the elderly.
A really, really big military.
Humane prisons.
The “war on drugs”.
Foreign aid. (after all, we can’t let the Islamics have all the fun!)
K-12 school textbooks.
I know you only asked for one, but I could not resist. Most of the evangelicals you see involved in politics have no objection to a huge government, as long at is doing what they want it to do.
“Most of the evangelicals you see involved in politics have no objection to a huge government, as long at is doing what they want it to do.”
That is because Evangelicals are mostly pietistic antinomians. As a result, they have no principled way of looking at society and government. They are also sentimentalists who are easily manipulated by appeals to emotion (”it’s for the children”).
If Evangelicals actually meant what they say about “believing” the Bible, not one of them, for example, would have his children in government schools and not one of them would vote for candidates that have an unbiblical view of the role of government.
Frankly, much of what passes for Christianity today (pun intended) is little more than a hoax.
Your list is not a true reflection of what conservative Christians support. More than any other group, conservative Christians are for a smaller Federal Government.
Why did you not include the “Faith Based Initiative”? Because you know Christian Conservatives did not support it.
The title sounds like it was written to be a college course?
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