Dems' Godly God-Fest Ends with Prayer by Former Christian Coalition Leader

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 4:17 PM on August 29, 2008.

Well, it was all very holy at the Dem convention this year -- more like a Pentacostal revival than a gathering of supposedly religion-hating liberals (Pentacostals rock, by the way. I went to a big Pentacostal mega-church in Florida's panhandle -- essentially Mississippi -- a few years ago, and they had a rockin’ band that was just grooving in a big way. Kids were picking each other up, there was tons of sex in the air, as well as free child-care and all that -- it reminded me of some hipster club, except, you know, for the speaking in tongues and flopping around on the floor and whatnot).

BeliefNet's Steve Waldman wrote approvingly about this year’s religiosity on the WSJ’s blog:

At the last convention, people of faith were treated as a worthwhile little interest group, roughly on the same level as mohair farmers.

What a difference four years make. By my count, there are at least nine different faith-related events. The week opened with an Interfaith religious service ... Events were held by the Faith Caucus, the Network for Spiritual Progressives, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and the American Muslim Democratic Caucus.

[...]

Benedictions and invocations have been performed not only by liberal clergy but also by people like Donald Miller, a popular Christian author, who closed his prayer, "I make this request in the name of Jesus Christ."

So there was a lot of God Bless this and that, although, interestingly, nobody asked God to damn America. And there were lots of "faith leaders" in attendance. Contrary to popular belief, I have no qualms with any of this, even if I question to what degree it might be effective.

I did want to draw attention to one leader in particular -- the man who followed Obama, offering the prayer that closed the convention. ‘Twas none other than Joel Hunter, mega-church pastor and, briefly, head of the rightwing Christian Coalition. He headed the group for about five minutes, until he said that maybe the (white) evangelical Christian movement might want to expand beyond Leviticus 18:22 and talk about environmental conservation, social justice, fighting poverty -- you know, the stuff Jesus would have cared about if he were alive today and all issues about which the GOP regularly sides with ... Satan! That brought a quick end to that gig (they called his departure a "resignation").

Anyway, his presence at the Dems' confab was noteworthy as he represents a new wave of more ... moderate, pluralistic preachers within the religious right. Frances FitzGerald, writing in The New Yorker, described Hunter as a leader of this emerging movement-within -a-movement:

Dr. Joel C. Hunter, the senior pastor of Northland church in Orlando, Florida, who every week preaches to ten thousand people in his church and through the Internet, is one of the new leaders. Long active in community affairs, he has become an activist on the national level. He has lobbied Congress for legislation to curb global warming, pressed for comprehensive immigration reform, and denounced the virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican primaries. He has worked with a group of evangelicals and secular progressives to try to establish common ground on such polarizing issues as abortion and the role of religion in public life. "I think the way we have been dealing with differences in this country simply doesn't work," Hunter told me recently. He is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, and with his fellow-members he has condemned Bush Administration policies permitting torture and the inhumane treatment of detainees. He has also twice attended the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, an annual gathering of American and Muslim leaders in Qatar, sponsored by the Brookings Institution. After the first meeting, where Hunter discovered that even the American diplomats assumed that all evangelicals believed that Israel had a Biblical right to the Palestinian territories, he and eighty-three colleagues sent an open letter to President Bush, calling for a two-state solution and justice for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. The statement was "hardly revolutionary," Hunter said, with a grin, "but it was subversive," meaning subversive of the religious right.

In "The Future of Faith in American Politics," David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University's school of theology, in Atlanta, notes that the movement's leaders are theological conservatives who share the concerns of the religious right about sex outside of heterosexual marriage, the preservation of the family, and abortion. However, many leaders, such as Hunter, oppose government coercion on issues of private morality, and all have what Gushee calls a "consistent pro-life agenda"--one that accords with Catholic social teachings on war, poverty, and human rights. Moreover, they lack the cultural attitudes descended from the fundamentalist resistance to modernist thought, such as a distrust of science, a rejection of institutional solutions to poverty, and the notion that evangelicals are the saving remnant of Christianity and the American tradition. Religious-right leaders have perpetuated these attitudes and done their best to see that evangelicals continue to regard themselves as an embattled subculture. The new leaders, however, embrace pluralism.

Over at the website of the Northland Church they're pitching Hunter's book, A New Kind of Conservative, thusly:

What if "conservative" did not just mean emphases on traditional morality, small government and lower taxes? What if conservative also meant doing the right thing in compassion issues like Jesus did: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, appreciating the "lilies" (God's creation), and freeing the oppressed?

What if believers were also enthusiastic for the furtherance of science and rigorous training in rational debate? What if conservatives were not only patriots but also valuable contributors as citizens of the world?

What if? Well, we'd live in a much better country and wouldn't be viewed as a bunch of backwards religious fanatics by much of the rest of the world. So of course I wish these "new evangelicals" the best of luck (I should note that there's nothing new here -- all of those same principles have long been espoused in black evangelical churches).

Tagged as: religious right, hunter, democratic convention

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.