About a month ago, William Stuntz wrote this piece about political common ground between red-state evangelicals and blue-state liberals: “Helping the poor is supposed to be the left’s central commitment, going back to the days of FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from national politics… I can’t prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it.”
Today, Nicholas Kristof observes that the most indefatigable advocates of liberal humanitarianism are now found on the Christian right:
Members of the Christian right…are the new internationalists, increasingly engaged in humanitarian causes abroad — thus creating opportunities for common ground between left and right on issues we all care about… Liberals traditionally were the bleeding hearts, while conservatives regarded foreign aid, in the words of Jesse Helms, as “money down a rat hole.” That’s changing. “One cannot understand international relations today without comprehending the new faith-based movement,” Allen Hertzke writes in “Freeing God’s Children,” a book about evangelicals leaping into human rights causes.
Hertzke, in a recent interview, noted that evangelicals’ human-rights advocacy has led to tensions with “business conservatives” and “proponents of realpolitik.” It seems that a religious revival wouldn’t necessarily be a gift to the political right, if only the left were not so resolutely secularist.
— Steven
The Dish 