Emerging Pensees

Sunday, December 21, 2008

John Armstrong on Richard Cizik

My friend John Armstrong (president and founder of Act 3 ministries) has had one of the best responses I've read to the forced resignation of Richard Cizik from the NAE that I've seen out there. He has a series of five blog posts in which he discusses this incident as a sign of the decline of the NAE and the evangelical movement as a whole back into an increasingly fundamentalist orientation. I think he's right on, and I'm glad he's the one saying it, and not just us younger emergent types, because he's been around long enough, and has been an active part of many of these influential evangelical circles to really know what he's talking about. Other evangelicals may be more inclined to listen to someone like him than to those (such as myself) whom they can simply slap a label like "liberal" or "emerging" on and then conveniently ignore. Anyhow, I applaud him for having the courage to go out on a limb, to name names, and to level some hard critique at his own movement.

You can read his responses here:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Labels: evangelicals, John Armstrong, Richard Cizik

posted by Mike Clawson at 4:07 PM | Permalink | 6 comments

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Richard Cizik got resigned

So Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), got resigned from the NAE for telling NPR that he suppors civil unions (but not gay marriage). Specifically he said:

In a short portion of the program, [host Terry] Gross asked him, “A couple of years ago when you were on our show, I asked you if you were changing your mind on that. And two years ago, you said you were still opposed to gay marriage. But now as you identify more with younger voters, would you say you have changed on gay marriage?”

Cizik responded, “I’m shifting, I have to admit. In other words, I would willingly say that I believe in civil unions. I don’t officially support redefining marriage from its traditional definition, I don’t think.”

Frankly Cizik's ouster over this doesn't surprise me at all. As someone who has gotten resigned from an evangelical institution myself, at least in part over my “liberal” (though I prefer to call them "biblical") political views (mine were even further left than Cizik; I was unreserved in my support for gay marriage), I know that many evangelicals can sometimes be even more dogmatic about their politics than their theology. Not to mention that there’s a growing trend towards neo-fundamentalism among many conservative evangelicals (I just wrote a 35-page research paper on the trend actually), defined by an exclusionary attitude towards those evangelicals who don't toe the narrowly defined party line. It seems that attitude is starting to infect even “big tent” groups like the NAE now.

However, there are still plenty of evangelicals out there who do agree with Cizik and appreciate his concern for the environment and the global poor, and his personal "shifting" towards increased compassion for GLBT folks. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get a job offer from Sojourners soon. Or maybe even go start his own new organization for progressive evangelicals.

Labels: evangelicals, gay marriage, politics, Richard Cizik

posted by Mike Clawson at 9:47 AM | Permalink | 2 comments