Evangelical Left potentates are now rallying to Obama’s
nomination of pro-abortion rights Governor Kathleen Sebelius as
Health and Human Services Secretary.
Describing themselves as “top Christian leaders” in
their news
release, they affirmed Sebelius as part of their ongoing
dedication to “finding common ground solutions to reduce the
number of abortions in America.” Ostensibly, by expanding the
welfare state, Sebelius will reduce overall abortion rates even
while the Obama Administration opposes any legal restrictions on
abortion, just as Sebelius supposedly did as Kansas’ governor.
The Evangelical Left pro-Sebelius effort was organized by Faith
in Public Life, a forum mostly for liberal Protestants. Its
website links
directly to Catholics for Kathleen Sebelius, whose own manifesto
was endorsed by Doug Kmiec and other pro-Obama Catholic
luminaries.
Liberal pro-Obama evangelicals face the same conundrum as
pro-Obama Catholics, having to argue that politicians who
vigorously support abortion rights will still somehow facilitate
a reduction in overall abortion rates. Still, the rhetorical
enthusiasm for Sebelius from the Evangelical Left seems a little
excessive.
“Under Governor Sebelius’ leadership, abortions have decreased in
Kansas by 10 percent, adoption funding and incentives have
increased, healthcare access for women and families has expanded,
prenatal care has become more widely available, and legislation
protecting the unborn from crime has become law,” the liberal
evangelicals enthused. “Such a record demonstrates a commitment
to results rather than rhetoric on life issues.” They further
hailed her for having been elected in Kansas by “wide margins in
a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats two to
one” and for proving that “pro-choice and pro-life leaders can
work together to advance a pro-family agenda.”
The evangelical enthusiasts for Sebelius include Florida
megachurch pastor and Global Warming alarmist Joel Hunter,
Christian ethicist and anti-torture activist David Gushee,
Emerging Church leader Brian McLaren, Fuller Seminary functional
pacifist and “just peace” advocate Glen Stassen, Evangelicals for
Social Action chief Ron Sider, and Episcopal priest and gay
rights proponent Randall Balmer, who tenuously clings to an
evangelical identification based more on his past than his
present.
Sebelius is a “person of deep faith,” the liberal evangelicals
emphasized, and she should be defended against attempts to
distract from her record of “reducing abortions and supporting
women and families in Kansas — and the task that lies ahead of
us all: working together to improve health care and reduce the
number of abortions in America.”
Beyond just the Sebelius nomination, Rev. Hunter, who insists he
is robustly pro-life, has seemingly also run interference for the
Obama decision to fund destruction of human embryos for stem cell
research. A member of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and
Neighborhood Partnerships, Hunter told the Politico
that he regretted that the administration had not better educated
its defenders before allowing opponents to interpret the stem
cell issue. “That would relieve a great deal of the alarm and
suspicion that is out there with pro-life groups,” Hunter said,
if defenders such as himself had received advance notification.
“Overall, there is still a desire to see him in the best light,”
Hunter said of his fellow evangelicals. “I think the ones who are
screaming bloody murder right now are the ones who may not have
been reachable to begin with. But there are a whole lot of us on
their e-mail lists — and we have people who want to think the
best of the president — but they are getting all this
mischaracterization and false information.”
Once a conservative religious activist who mobilized his church
against same-sex unions, Hunter briefly acceded to taking over
the nearly defunct Christian Coalition in 2006. But the
Coalition’s board changed its mind when absorbing that Hunter
would focus on Global Warming activism. Climate issues have
become a rallying cry among liberal evangelicals. Under the Bush
Administration, deriding U.S. interrogation policies as “torture”
also became trendy.
David Gushee of Mercer University in Atlanta founded Evangelicals
for Human Rights to target Bush’s supposed torture regime. Now
Gushee’s group is supporting a “truth commission” to expose the
purported crimes of the last administration, similar to the South
African initiative to shed light on Apartheid’s atrocities. Glen
Stassen of Fuller seminary in Pasadena, California worked with
Gushee on his anti-torture [by the U.S.] manifesto, gaining
endorsement from the increasingly left-leaning National
Association of Evangelicals, in which Rev. Hunter is prominent.
Stassen, who is the son of perennial presidential candidate
Harold Stassen, advocates a form of “just peace making” that,
while not specifically pacifist, will not admit to the moral
acceptability of military force. Somewhat famously, Stassen
issued a report during the 2004 election, claiming abortion rates
had declined during the Clinton presidency but had risen under
Bush. Pro-life groups vigorously contested Stassen’s methodology,
which rested on the premise that the largesse of Democratic
compassion makes abortion less desired.
Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, is a
conventional Big Government liberal who still has steadfastly
remained attached to orthodox theology, including the defense of
marriage and sanctity of life. His defense of Sebelius is a
little more surprising than for some others on the Evangelical
Left. But the argument for Sebelius is perhaps no more
compromising than support for other pro-abortion rights
politicians whom Sider and the Evangelical Left have supported.
McLaren is the chief guru of the “emergent church” movement,
which is largely comprised of self-professed “post-modern”
evangelicals who incline left politically. Balmer is an academic
who has produced PBS documentaries about evangelicals. Now an
Episcopal priest in the liberal Diocese of Connecticut, Balmer is
a harsh critic of conservative Evangelical hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is a charge that some of those conservative
Evangelicals might throw back at the Evangelical Left for
compromising its supposedly pro-life convictions. How far that
seeming compromise will carry the Evangelical Left during the
Obama Administration may surprise liberal and conservative
religionists alike.
