Evangelical Christians are nothing but tools for the Republican Party!

Well, that's what I'm getting from this review of Charles Marsh's Wayward Christian Soldiers. Read on:

There is nothing ironic, mitigated, or partial about the evangelical commitment to the Bush administration--and this is what infuriates Marsh more than anything else. Out of a combination of cultural parochialism and theological illiteracy, American evangelicals have come to believe that their Christian faith is perfectly compatible with unwavering faith in the Bush administration--in fact, many of them have come to believe that the two faiths are, at bottom, identical. Jesus Christ and George W. Bush, the city of God and the city of man, the Righteous Kingdom and the United States of America: for a distressingly large number of evangelicals, the clashing tonalities at the core of orthodox Christianity have become perfectly harmonious chords in an uplifting rendition of "God Bless America."

Marsh is suspicious of all such attempts at synthesis, believing that a Christianity that compromises with the ways of the world inevitably conforms to the ways of the world. And Marsh makes his point with alarming ease, noting in one of his later chapters that although polls in early 2003 showed that an astonishing 87 percent of white evangelical Christians in the United States supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, "Christian leaders around the world--evangelical, orthodox, and liberal" expressed "dismay over the administration's case [for war]." Marsh quotes, to great effect, twenty-five of these critical statements, written by the leaders of Christian organizations from every corner of the globe, most of which the majority of American evangelicals have undoubtedly never seen or read. Regardless of one's position on the war, these pages of Marsh's book make a powerful and important point about the American evangelical difference: either the United States contains the only Christians capable of recognizing the fundamental compatibility between the moral message of Christianity and George W. Bush's foreign policy--or else evangelicalism in America has transformed itself into Republican Party propaganda.

Comments

[Simon]

Politics and religion - never a good mix.

[Nonanon]

Oh brother,
I just took this book back to the library because I wasn't going to have the time to get it read. Now I have to go get it back! Interesting (albeit sad) review.

I can never tell what's corrupting what, personally--politics screwing up religion or religion screwing up politics. Evidently a little from column A, a little from column B.