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While it's never disclosed in the movie, Jesus Camp is in fact a Pentecostal camp, which puts it far to the right theologically and politically, even within the evangelical movement. The directors explained that they didn't want to confuse audiences by disclosing this and instead referred to the camp only as "evangelical." Unfortunately, they unwittingly added to the enormous confusion that people like Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, has been trying to clear up for years.
Wallis, who is the founder and editor of Sojourners, a progressive Christian magazine, spends much of his time traveling the country talking to students and meeting with evangelical leaders. Wallis believes the future of the country is in the hands of moderate evangelical voters. He estimates, based on polls and personal experience, that about half of evangelicals are the immovable Religious Right but the other half are open to, if not hungry for, progressive leadership."The facts on the ground are changing," says Wallis. He reports a marked increase in attendance of his speeches on Christian campuses and the issues he gets asked about the most are not gay marriage or abortion. Wallis says abortion will naturally remain important issue to the moderate evangelical voter, but it is not a litmus test. They want leaders who will acknowledge their moral concerns about this issue and who are committed to decreasing the number of abortions, a position that puts them well within the mainstream of Democratic voters.
And it's no different if Wallis is meeting with the leader of an evangelical mega-church. One such leader recently told Wallis, "I'm a conservative on Jesus, the Bible and the Resurrection, but I'm becoming a social liberal." When Wallis asked why, he heard what has become a familiar refrain: evangelicals are increasingly despairing over the neglect of the poor, the environment, and the U.S. inaction on fighting the genocide in Darfur.
White evangelicals make up close to 25 percent of the electorate and, in 2004, a whopping 78 percent of them voted for George Bush. But evangelicals didn't always line up behind the Republican candidate. According to Pew Research, in 1987, white evangelicals were almost evenly divided between the two parties. And today, many evangelical leaders believe that a growing number of these voters are prepared to return to the Democratic fold, but only if Democrats stop misunderstanding, neglecting, and even intentionally ignoring what was and should be a natural constituency.
From this article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-powers/evangelical-voters-and-de_b_22914.htmlLink to Sojourners:
http://www.sojo.net/I'm not religious, so I'll have to let others speak to strategy.
:hi: