This "religion in politics" panel is painful. Dueling old white guys on whether unborn people or living people are the most important issue for evangelicals, and whether Christians need to worry about the planet.
Jim Wallis: Poverty should be the biggest concern for evangelicals.
Richard Land: I don't care what this CBS poll says, all the evangelicals I know think abortion is the most important issue.
Wallis: 30,000 kids die each day from preventable disease. "That breaks the heart of God, it should break our hearts too."
Land: Well, if women would just stop having abortions, have babies, and get hitched, we wouldn't have this problem. "If mothers would marry the fathers of their children, that would eliminate more poverty than anything we could do."
Wallis: It shouldn't be a choice -- both should matter to evangelicals. "We must not pit the unborn against the poorest children of the earth. They are both among the weak."
There was almost no show of support for Wallis' vision of a wider "pro-life" agenda that includes more than just abortion. He also brought up the environment and climate change, where his views were even less popular, eliciting several loud boos.
Wallis: "Climate change threatens human lives, and the environment is clearly on the mainstream of the evangelical agenda."
Land: "The bible says the earth is for human betterment."
Say what you will about Wallis' anti-abortion stance, but at least his view of which lives Christian evangelicals should be "pro" isn't narrow and hypocritical. Too bad it fared so poorly here.
--Kate Sheppard
