Rodney Stark on Why the Evangelical Left Has No Future

Timothy Dalrymple has a great interview with Rodney Stark at Patheos titled "Crusades for Christ." I would like to post some excerpts on the crusades, which was the main point of the interview, but I did review Stark's book God's Battalions here already.

But what I will do is to quote the last few paragraphs of the interview, which Justin Taylor also quoted over at "Between Two Worlds." (HT to Justin Taylor) He has some very appropriate (in my opinion) comments on the Evangelical left and the attempts of the Left to demonize Evangelicals as extremists.

Here they are:

What happens with "progressives" is that they cannot get any traction amongst evangelicals. Their audience, or their intended audience, is largely among the "mainline" congregations and the media that favor them. I don't think they have found much traction amongst most evangelicals -- and I think that's for the same reason that everybody has fled the old mainline. You get tired of hearing that capitalism is sinful and that Cuba is the way of the future, and other kinds of idiocy like that. Yet when I look at evangelicals using survey data, they are not a bunch of right-wing Republicans. They're conservative, but they're about equally Republicans and Democrats. It's religious and not political conservatism that defines them.

Very clearly, evangelicals don't like abortion. They do like school prayer and a few things like that. If those were right-wing issues, then sure, evangelicals would be right-wing. But if they're not right-wing issues -- and the majority of Americans agree with evangelicals on those issues -- then I fail to see that there's anything right-wing or scandalous about it. But when it comes down to meat and potatoes politics, evangelicals are not that different from the rest of America, and that's important for people to understand. A whole lot of them voted for Obama. Whether they will do so again, I don't know.

So, I think those guys are entirely wrong. I am tired of people like Mark Noll worrying about "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." What do they expect? I don't consider it a scandal that a bunch of laymen don't want to read academic books. It's not a scandal that ordinary evangelicals are not left-wing seminary professors.

Too many evangelical intellectuals want to be the house conservative at the liberal banquet. So Martin Marty will invite you to his table because you can be the token evangelical. I'm sorry, but I'm not a token anything.

I could not agree more. Read the whole interview here.