Is This Man the Future of Evangelical America?
July 1, 2009
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June 29, 2009
Richard Cizik puts the protest back in Protestant.
It is impossible not to watch this new interview I conducted with him without pausing to marvel at how many mainstream Evangelical theological and political positions he challenges. That he does so with charm and wit just makes it all the more entertaining.
Now, people challenge Evangelical theological and political positions all the time. Mainline Protestants, for example, do so routinely and with heat (varying degrees of charm and wit, though). Yet please recall that Mr. Cizik was vice president for governmental affairs for the very organization that espoused those hotly contested positions, the National Association of Evangelicals.
He is no longer with the NAE. After 28 years Cizik resigned from the organization in the aftermath of a controversy surrounding remarks he made in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross. "I'm shifting, " he told Gross, "I have to admit. In other words, I would willingly say that I believe in civil unions."
This was not the first time (and it certainly won't be the last) that Cizik shook up Conservative Christendom. Five years ago he came out in favor of greater concern for the environment--again not an issue that generally preoccupied Evangelicals. In calling for "Creation Care," he argued that most of his co-religionists were neglecting their God-ordained duty to be responsible stewards of the earth.
I witnessed Cizik's proclivity for dissent a few months back at Georgetown University. In the run-up to the election, as part of my interest in Christian Zionism, I conducted a public interview with Cizik and my colleague in the Program for Jewish Civilization Professor Michael Oren (who is now Israeli Ambassador to the United States). I won't get into the particulars of that discussion now, but suffice it to say that Cizik's views on the peace process seemed more Obama and Mainline than Bush and Evangelical.
Throughout the interview posted here, Cizik demonstrates his penchant for saying exactly what is on his mind. He bemoans the fact that Evangelicals became "toadies" of the GOP ("the party of denial, denial, denial" in his words). He warns of a looming divide in Evangelical America. In response to my question about whether gay and lesbian members of his church are affirmed in Christ, he responds that "they ought to be."
For an encore he concedes that there may be a good deal of common ground between the views of the New Evangelicals which he represents and Mainline Protestants.
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