From First Things.
Excerpt:
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has responded vigorously to the restrictive and unworkable “conscience regulations” being imposed on health care providers by the Obama Administration’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Department. The Catholic Archdiocese for Military Service has said “no” to allowing priests in the Armed Forces perform homosexual “weddings,” now that the historic prohibition on homosexuals in the military has been lifted. And most recently, eighteen Catholic colleges and universities banded together and, through the Alliance Defense Fund, submitted comments to HHS citing a violation of religious freedom regarding the interim final rules on preventative services.
We applaud the efforts of America’s Catholic leadership in defense of religious liberty. But we do so with a certain measure of consternation. As Evangelical Protestants, we wonder: Why is organized Evangelicalism so silent?
Where is the National Association of Evangelicals?
Where is the (Evangelical) Council for Christian Colleges and Universities?
Where are the editorials and feature articles in Evangelical publications?
At a time when our religious liberty is being eroded by an Administration that insists on forcing its anti-Christian policies on American public life, why are so many of our leaders shuffling their feet and staring at the ground?
[…]Every Christian school in the nation that offers insurance to its employees or students will be affected by the 2010 health care law—as schools like the University of Dallas, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Ave Maria University immediately recognized. While Evangelicalism does not have specific teachings on contraception in the way that the Catholic Church does, no Christian organization in the United States should be comfortable with the requirement that insurance must cover abortions. Since that is the intention of the Obama administration, why are Evangelical Protestant colleges and universities, and Evangelical leaders generally, not speaking out? Why are they not joining with Catholic leaders and institutions in opposition to these anti-religious liberty measures?
I try to talk about these issues on my blog, but I agree that evangelicals are disengaged. Evangelicals are the most conservative voters, but we have to do more than vote Republican. We have to think about these issues between elections. We have to vote in primaries. We have to knock on doors. We have to write blog posts and editorials. We have to get advanced degrees. We have to get involved in the debate. It’s not enough to have the right opinion, we have to be convincing.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Why? One word: premillennialism. Wasn’t so in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s been a canker that has eaten the heart out of Evangelical social engagement (apart from evangelism, to rescue people from this untoward generation), and resulted in people turning to the Left and crypto-Arianism in order to do what their hearts told them was right, but that entailed the acceptance of liberal agendas as well, as so they soft-pedalled the issues.
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I agree completely.
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Why are you evangelical wintery- The envagelist movement is departure from doctrine is it not ? The sola scriptura was never a part of the historical church fathers teaching.It makes sense that if Christ wanted to pass his message onto humanity he would needed a perennially running institution right from his time upto when he returns to gaurd and reaffirm the truth from any distortion, hence the Catholic Church. Being an apologetics person you can surely see the sense in that ?
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I think you mean Postmillennialism (of a certain sort within certain circles)?
Nevertheless one word answers – whether pre-, post-, pan- or a- will never work to explain historical phenomena. That is reductionism. Several factors are always at work leading to a certain event or happening or state…
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No, I meant premill. It brought in the notion that the world is going to pot, and it will all end in flames, so what is the point of doing anything about the situation we are in. Postmillers engaged in social action because they believed we could build something of the kingdom of God here and now.
Better to go to war in the ME, and perhaps begin the universal conflagration and end times, than to go and help bring peace through diplomacy and trade; that is the upshot of premill. The postmill optimism passed to the socilaist movement, who believed they could change the world now, rather than ‘paradise delayed’. Scientific rationalism also asserted the same. The churches retreated into quietism and fundamentalism – striking poses over moral issues, rather than getting their hands dirty sorting the issues. That’s why evangelicals had to have conferences on social engagement in the latter 20th cent, and why people like Wallis did what they did.
There is nothing wrong with one word answers as long as you define the content and context. Darbyite premillenialism was a major doctrinal sea-change in protestant history, that spread out into the holiness, baptist, pentecostal and charismatic churches. It disarmed them for engagement with the intellectual currents of their day., and laid the ground for the left-right/conservative-liberal split of the later 20th century. People like Marcus Borg might have been more evangelical if that movement had addressed issues differently. It was He who lead me away from evangelicalism because he answered the questions I had (it was the realisation of the incipient crypto-arianism of the Left wing of the protestant church that led me back).
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