Evangelical Left Death?
By Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.
Does the Evangelical Left still meaningfully exist? Or has it all become simply Religious Left?
The former retains evangelical theological and ethical commitments, including biblical authority, salvation by faith, the centrality of conversion, plus historic Christian teachings about sexuality and sanctity of all human life.
The latter is more theologically vague while liberal or indifferent on abortion and sexual morality. It reserves its dogmatic commitments for progressive politics.
Years ago, the old Religious Left mostly was once influential Mainline Protestant agencies and ecumenical groups like the National Council of Churches. They claimed to speak for their tens of millions of church members. But their membership and institutional collapse has left them almost societally irrelevant. Recently they’ve been calling for a ceasefire in the war against Hamas. Who’s listening?
The Evangelical Left was mostly parachurch groups and academics from evangelical schools. They opposed the Religious Right’s alignment with Republicans and touted more government regulation, a larger welfare state, and environmentalism. Typically, they were pacifist or close to it.
A leader of the Evangelical Left was the late Ron Sider, an Eastern University professor who founded Evangelicals for Social Action. He was a liberal Democrat who was pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and he cared deeply about the overseas persecuted church. He was a fond frenemy to my predecessor as IRD president, the late Diane Knippers. She once wryly commented that it was nearly her full-time job as a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals to counter Sider’s influence.
Sider died in 2022. His Evangelicals for Social Action changed their name to Christians for Social Action in 2020 and now is Religious Left, indistinguishable from old Mainline Protestantism, touting LGBTQIA+, no longer pro-life if not not favorable to abortion rights, and in sync with other themes of the cultural left. It is also, without Sider and its evangelical commitments, less influential.
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