Joe Carter sets the record straight by noting:
. . . The Family Research Council (FRC)--the premier lobbying organization of the Christian right in Washington, D.C.--has been attempting to collect signatures on an online petition asking President Bush to approve new Title X regulations ensuring that no taxpayer money goes to subsidize the abortion facilities of groups like Planned Parenthood.
To date, almost one million emails have been sent to Christians asking them to do nothing more than add their name. This is about as minor a level of commitment or involvement as it gets yet only about 3% have done so. More Christians voted for the 5th place contestant on last week's American Idol than have petitioned to defund abortion mills.
This is the typical reaction at the grassroots level to almost every political initiative in the "religious right." Lot's of talk; little to no action.
FRC is considered one of the major players in the world of conservative evangelical politics. And yet the organization's ability to have any influence or impact in the political realm is limited by the lack of grassroots commitment. Though FRC and similar groups attempt to rally the troops, they are unable to lead the army of politically engaged evangelicals because such a group is all but nonexistent. . . .
If evangelicals--and Christians in general--truly cared about this issue, abortion on demand would not be the law of the land.Imagine if every Christian in America vowed not to cast a vote for any candidate of any party for any office if they supported or condoned the killing of the unborn. Imagine if every pastor in America had the courage to stand in the pulpit and deliver the Gospel-centric message that God abhors this slaughtering of the innocent and that for the church to tolerate this sin is a fecal-colored stain on the garment of Christ's bride.
But it will never happen because the evangelical church isn't committed as the church to rectifying this grave injustice. We never have been.
In a 1971 resolution on abortion, the Southern Baptist Convention resolved that "society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life." The largest evangelical denomination in America had a peculiar definition of "sanctity of human life", however, for the very next sentence called upon Southern Baptists to "work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion" under such conditions as "fetal deformity" and damage to the "emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." Three years later--and two years after Roe codified this position--the SBC reaffirmed the resolution. It wasn't until 1980 that the SBC finally condemned abortion as a grave evil, a position that has always been maintained by the Catholic Church.
Thirty-seven years later, we evangelicals still haven't caught up on issues of the sanctity of life. Come to the annual March for Life held in Washington, D.C. every January and you'll find fifty Catholics for every evangelical. For Catholics it is a moral, spiritual, and political issue. For evangelicals it nothing more than an emotional issue that we aren't really dedicated to doing much about.
Surprisingly, Phil doesn't recognize that it is precisely our lack of political will that has caused us to fail on this issue. He doesn't even draw the obvious inference from his own observations:
Evangelicals have virtually nothing to show for all the time, energy, and resources they have invested in political efforts over the past three and a half decades....
Although by most accounts evangelicals constitute the largest single voting bloc in America, they have been remarkably ineffective when it comes to using politics to reverse America's moral and spiritual decline. In fact, if you measure their success or failure according to their own stated political ambitions, evangelicals have failed spectacularly in America's political arena. Over the past quarter century, they have not accomplished any of their top long-term legislative or constitutional goals.
Although there have been some significant achievement, Phil's basic point is correct. But he fails to draw the obvious conclusion from the data. Rather than assuming that evangelicals are a large, powerful, committed political bloc that, for some inexplicable reason, is completely ineffective, the more realistic conclusion is that politically engaged evangelicals are like a herd of unicorns: powerful and abundant in the imagination while not actually existing in the real world. (more . . .)