1 Response to Tim Stafford on “What Ever Happened to Evangelicals”

1. Rob Braun says:

   August 19, 2016 at 2:51 pm

   I was around, an adult, in 1973 when Roe v Wade was passed by SCOTUS. I was an evangelical. We never discussed the Roe v Wade decision in our church. Not one sermon or conversation. When it did come up the first words that usually came out of people’s mouths was, “That’s a Catholic issue.” I remember a dear Catholic friend remonstrating me over my church’s indifference to the SCOTUS decision. It wasn’t till Ronald Reagan, who supported abortion rights as a Republican Governor of California, ran for the presidency of the US that abortion became a political football. All of a sudden in 1980, by the political genius of Carl Rove, a campaign advisor to Reagan, abortion became the key political issue to gain the Evangelical vote. Before Reagan, according to most polling at the time, Evangelicals were pretty evenly split between the parties. Roe v Wade was one of the tools that allowed Reagan, a man who ruled his life by the Astrological Calendar, to beat the Sunday school teaching and born again Southern Baptist president of the US, Jimmy Carter, and bring the vast majority of Evangelical voters into the Republican Party. To this day I am amazed by the way that the American evangelical voters abandoned the first openly Evangelical born again president over an issue that didn’t matter to them a year before the election. Also, I’m equally stunned by how this one issue along with Gay Marriage has bound the Evangelical vote to the Republican Party. To me what Carl Rove did was true political alchemy. I hope with the triumph of Trump as the nominee for POTUS evangelicals’ eyes will open to see that there are more political issues that should concern them in our democracy as Bible believing Christians than just the Gay Marriage and abortion issues alone.

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