Evangelicals (Even) a Liberal Can Love

by Nicholas D. Kristof for the New York Times (2.3.08)

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith....Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

...Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said evangelicals “have made some incredible contributions” in the struggle against global poverty. “We don’t give them credit for the changes they’ve made,” she added. Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, said, “Many evangelical leaders have been key to taking the climate issue across the cultural divide.”

Read the whole column here.

For those of you who have read the 2006 bestselling book, "Who Really Cares?", I think this is a solid recap of the book's premise and apt translation to the current electoral process.