(Caution: I'm going to throw some bombs here. If you're expecting measured, academic prose, I recommend looking elsewhere.)

John McCain's problems with the (nominally) Christian Right have been well-documented. Jim Dobson, Christian quack "psychologist," has said that he "cannot and will not" vote for him, and the few evangelicals he did have on board - John Hagee and Rod Parsley - had to be thrown under the bus when it turned out that they aren't so much on board with things like not hating everyone who isn't a right-wing Christian. So even though John McCain agrees with the old guard of the (nominally) Christian Right on their big-money issues - he's anti-choice and anti-gay - he's not exactly their favorite person in the world.

Couple that with the fact that young evangelicals seem to be actually (gasp!) reading their Bibles and discovering that Jesus seemed to care a lot more about poor people than he did about whether those eeeeevil gays are marrying. They're discovering that the Bible has a lot more to say about caring for nature and making society an equitable place for the least of these than it does about the great bogeyman of "secular humanism." In short, they're discovering that they've been sold a bill of goods by the charlatans and pretenders running the (nominally) Christian Right, and that the values of the Bible, the values of the Christian tradition, are not gay marriage, secular humanism, a ban on women's rights, and free markets for all.

Enter Mara Vanderslice and the good people at the Matthew 25 Network. They don't have much up on the Intarwebs yet, but from what I understand, they're going to be reaching out to young evangelicals and trying to persuade them that there is much more to being a Christian in political life than walking in lockstep with the (nominally) Christian Right. They're going to demonstrate that it is the Democratic Party and Barack Obama - not the Republican Party and John McCain - who are likely to work for the people Jesus says we need to work for - the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the prisoners, the indigent.

I think it's a good start.

Labels: Barack Obama, Christian Right, Christianity, Matthew 25 Network, Politics, Religion