{"id":435,"date":"2008-05-01T11:37:58","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T15:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/?p=435"},"modified":"2008-05-01T11:37:58","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T15:37:58","slug":"a-debate-worth-your-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/a-debate-worth-your-attention","title":{"rendered":"A debate worth your attention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phil Johnson works for John MacArthur and blogs at Pyromaniacs<\/a>. His recent post on How Evangelicals Traded Their Spiritual Authority for a Mess of Political Pottage<\/a>\u00a0concludes…<\/p>\n

…it is my conviction that because they have invested so much in the political process, evangelicals have weakened their own movement with a tendency to compromise; they have sacrificed evangelical distinctives, and they have gone far off message from the central truths of the gospel. Political activism has been a disaster for the American evangelical movement on every front. Not only have we completely failed at the political process; we have failed even more egregiously to remain distinct from the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and has generated a response from my friend Joe Carter over at the Evangelical Outpost<\/a> titled, A Herd of Unicorns: The Myth of Evangelical Political Engagement<\/a>\u00a0in which he responds in part…<\/p>\n

Contrary to what many secularists claim–and many Christians believe–we evangelicals are not all that politically involved. Sure, like most Americans we talk<\/em> a lot about politics, especially in an election season. But the claim that we are involved in actual political activities–lobbying, organizing, campaigning, etc.–would be difficult to support with actual evidence.<\/p>\n

.\u00a0. . . . .<\/p>\n

Rather than assuming that evangelicals are a large, powerful, committed political bloc that, for some inexplicable reason, is completely ineffective, the more realistic conclusion is that politically engaged evangelicals are like a herd of unicorns: powerful and abundant in the imagination while not actually existing in the real world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read Phil then Joe and then hope that both honor my request to join me on a future edition of The Paul Edwards Program<\/a> to bring the debate into the real world of talk radio.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Joe Carter and Frank Turk (from Pyromaniacs Blog) will join Paul this afternoon at 4:30 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phil Johnson works for John MacArthur and blogs at Pyromaniacs. His recent post on How Evangelicals Traded Their Spiritual Authority for a Mess of Political Pottage\u00a0concludes… …it is my conviction that because they have invested so much in the political … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[91,155,452,612],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-evangelicals","tag-joe-carter","tag-phil-johnson","tag-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}