Third Way Calls For a Halt to the Culture Wars
Posted by Rachel Laser, Director of The Culture Project Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:50:00 GMT
Yesterday, Third Way and a group of national Evangelical leaders held a press conference and announced something audacious and potentially historic – we called for a halt to the culture wars.
We did so with the release of Third Way’s new paper Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values Between Evangelicals and Progressives. EJ Dionne devoted his Washington Post column to our paper on Tuesday, A Culture War Treaty, and I discussed it with Christian conservative radio host Paul Edwards on the Paul Edwards Program this week.
This paper not only seeks a truce in the battles between progressives and Evangelicals, it offers concrete proposals for common ground on the toughest matters that have divided the two sides: abortion, gay and lesbian issues, and the role of religion in the public square.
At the release of the paper, Third Way stood with Pastor Joel Hunter, a one-time President-Elect of the Christian Coalition, Professor David Gushee, a leading Evangelical thinker and columnist and our Evangelical co-authors, Dr. Randy Brinson, who runs Redeem the Vote and Joe Battaglia, President of the Christian media firm Renaissance Communications. The press conference was co-sponsored by Faith in Public Life, a group that helped connect Third Way with many of these Evangelical leaders. You can watch the press conference here.
The paper is supported by more than 20 groups from both sides of the divide, Evangelical and progressive. They span the gamut from the Human Rights Campaign and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State to New York Divinity School President Paul DeVries and Texas megachurch pastor Bob Roberts. You can read all of the statements of support here.
The paper includes original analysis of the most recent public opinion research on Evangelicals, which presents a new formula for understanding the diversity of the Evangelical community. We found that roughly 1/5 of Evangelicals are progressive already, 1/3 are moderates (even on tough cultural issues) and 1/2 are conservative. That means that about 1/2 of American Evangelicals – about 25 million people – are open to progressive points of view.
Our paper also offers a corresponding set of recommendations on how progressives and Evangelicals can find common ground approaches to issues such as reducing the need for abortion, respecting the role of religion in the public square and affirming the human dignity of gay and lesbian people.
I hope you’ll take a look.