For years Catholics and evangelical Protestants have found common cause especially in opposing abortion and homosexual practice, including gay marriage and challenges to Christian privilege. They have also stood together to assert their right to conscientiously object to laws they find morally repugnant.
But does this mean they’re friends? Jamie Manson’s sharp-eyed piece on the pope’s embrace of some of the more visible evangelical figures suggests it is so. If that is the case, it must be a rather narrow version of friendship that collides with the pope’s major message in several ways.
Rick Warren , Tony Perkins, Jim Robison and the others identified as Francis’ amigos are an unblended lot. They act on their individual agendas (evangelicalism being perhaps the truest form of free enterprise extant) and not only compete for audience but frequently stir mutual friction. They publicly stand four square against shared moral evils, however, and that alone makes for friendships of convenience with official Catholicism. Warren has become the media go-to preacher for his image as the “new evangelical” who shows sympathy with broader social causes like environmentalism, but so far that advocacy has barely shown itself.
Read it all.
(NC Reporter) Pope Francis Francis and His Evangelical Allies
For years Catholics and evangelical Protestants have found common cause especially in opposing abortion and homosexual practice, including gay marriage and challenges to Christian privilege. They have also stood together to assert their right to conscientiously object to laws they find morally repugnant.
But does this mean they’re friends? Jamie Manson’s sharp-eyed piece on the pope’s embrace of some of the more visible evangelical figures suggests it is so. If that is the case, it must be a rather narrow version of friendship that collides with the pope’s major message in several ways.
Rick Warren , Tony Perkins, Jim Robison and the others identified as Francis’ amigos are an unblended lot. They act on their individual agendas (evangelicalism being perhaps the truest form of free enterprise extant) and not only compete for audience but frequently stir mutual friction. They publicly stand four square against shared moral evils, however, and that alone makes for friendships of convenience with official Catholicism. Warren has become the media go-to preacher for his image as the “new evangelical” who shows sympathy with broader social causes like environmentalism, but so far that advocacy has barely shown itself.
Read it all.