… 33-year-old Nashville resident [Tyler Wigg-Stevenson] has assembled a surprising corps of allies and endorsers more than twice his age and known for their hawkish ways of yore, including retired U.S. senator Sam Nunn and Reagan-era secretary of State George Shultz.
Less encouraging is the shape of the initial resistance Wigg-Stevenson often encounters as he travels around the country urging Christians to join the nuclear abolition cause ”” a mind-set that coaxes many believers to accept, even welcome, the imminent end of the world. As signaled by the runaway success of the Left Behind books, end-time expectations hold undeniable sway in evangelical America, which makes long-term investments in a better future seem utterly beside the point.
Thankfully, Wigg-Stevenson and many new-breed evangelicals like him are refusing the kind of end-times bait that lets believers off the hook ”” off the hook of inspired social action that can make their faith a powerful blessing to their society and their time.
A strange mission area to say the least.
Nuclear stockpiles have been and will continue to decline. The nuclear threat now is the weapons in the hand of rogue states and weapons/material being sold to international criminal/terrorist networks. None of which can be solved by this type of activism.
Out of all the issues that need attention in this world this would not be on my radar. To each his own, though.
I tend to agree with Palagious’ opinion in #1 above. I would merely add that these end of the world Millennialists that are referenced are heretics on multiple levels. That in itself is not too worrisome. Heresy is more fashionable today than possibly at any time since the very early days of the Church. What IS worrisome is the tendency on the part of large numbers of this particular brand of heretics to insist that US Gov’t policy, especially foreign and national security policy, be in conformity with or somehow guided by, their warped theology.
That I find alarming.
Palagious, I know people who are involved in the Nuclear Threat Initiative and that is precisely the point of this type of activism. If there is less nuclear material, it is less likely to fall into the hands of terrorists. No one believes we can put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. That knowledge exists and will continue to exist. But there is very little chance of terrorists developing their own nuclear capability (without state sponsorship). The threat is primarily of terrorist purchase or seizure of existing weaponry (either from unguarded ex-Soviet nukes, North Korea, or from the proliferation of nuclear capability to rogue states, mainly Iran). So the drive to secure and reduce or eliminate such weaponry is precisely to prevent its terrorist use.