What do evangelicals uniquely add to American foreign policy?
One of the reasons for liberal antagonism toward evangelicals is this sort of distasteful recollection of evangelicals as pious hypocrites who just want to engage in culture wars and peer down at gays or single fathers. The National Association of Evangelicals has re-branded the movement as a group of people who try desperately to alleviate human suffering whether they’re kids being tossed into bonfires in Darfur or sex trafficking victims in Cambodia. I do have one beef with some elements of the evangelical community. Often church leaders have a rigid ideological position that is insufficiently informed by facts on the ground. Everybody does this. But on the issue of condoms, for example, there’s a huge gulf between church leadership or Washington offices, with deep hostility toward condoms, and missionaries all across Africa who are just desperately trying to save lives. Their friends are dying of AIDS, and they’re trying to keep people alive so they can save them. I hope the evangel
