CNN’s Belief Blog published R. Albert Mohler Jr.’s column, “Are evangelicals dangerous?,” Sunday, Oct. 16. Since then, the comments section has witnessed significant activity, amounting to 75 pages in length at the time of this post.
In the column, Mohler, Southern Seminary president, discusses American culture’s perception of evangelical Christians as a threat to the political process and overall health of the nation in view of the coming presidential election. As Mohler notes, some widely heard voices qualify evangelicalism as a movement of unenlightened social and theological conservatives driven toward overcoming democracy and instituting theocracy. He writes:
If evangelicals intend to engage public issues and cultural concerns, we have to be ready for the scrutiny and discomfort that comes with disagreement over matters of importance. We have to risk being misunderstood – and even misrepresented – if we intend to say anything worth hearing.
Are evangelicals dangerous? Well, certainly not in the sense that more secular voices warn. The vast majority of evangelicals are not attempting to create a theocracy, or to oppose democracy.
To the contrary, evangelicals are dangerous to the secularist vision of this nation and its future precisely because we are committed to participatory democracy.
The entire column is available here: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/15/my-take-are-evangelicals-dangerous