November 21, 2007

David Wells is the Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is also a prolific writer, including his most recent volume “Above All Earthly Pow’rs.” He was interviewed on “The Frank Pastore Show.”

Frank Pastore: In a recent piece by David Kirkpatrick in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Evangelical Crack Up,” David Wells was quoted essentially as saying, “Look this is not new. We have seen liberalism encroach theologically against conservatives for a very long time, in fact through all of church history, and it follows a pretty predictable pattern….” From your perspective, is the religious right dead?

David Wells: If you look at the numbers, for example, that the Pew poll has put out, there is no question that there is significant disaffection among evangelicals with the Bush administration. I think among born again people, the support for Bush right now is about 40 percent, which is a little bit higher then the nation, but not a whole lot higher. The causes of the disaffection are different. Some, of course, don’t like the Iraq war, some are fiscal conservatives who do not like the big spending, and some are disappointed that the moral agenda that you’ve talked about and specifically abortion, and homosexual rights, and gay marriages that has not been stopped. So, I do think there is considerable disaffection with this particular administration whether or not it is justified.

However, I think you need to distinguish that from the moral commitment of real biblical believers. I don’t think that changes from week to week as the polls do.

Pastore: I’m most interested in your opinion dealing with the state of the church on issues like inerrancy, the direction that you see American Christianity going…. A lot of people are moving away from political issues and embracing what they understand to be moral issues, which ultimately are political: poverty, HIV/AIDS, raising taxes on the poor, global outreach, pacifism in our foreign policy.

Wells: I think your observation is quite right, and this is a complicated question because, I think what we are looking at, on the one hand is the slow disintegration of this great coalition of Bible-believing Christians that have been sort of together since the end of the Second World War. That now is beginning to disintegrate…

On that point, I don’t think that there is any doubt that there is a far more profound crack-up in the evangelical coalition than The New York Times talked about. What they talked about was the growing diversity of political opinion among more conservative Christians. I think the much more fundamental question is what has happened to character, our theological character as believers.