Crouse Says “Evangelical Manifesto” Muddies the Evangelical Waters     5/6/2008

Washington, D.C. — Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Director and Senior Fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, commented on Wednesday’s release of “An Evangelical Manifesto,” the product of a 10-member steering committee that “seeks to clarify the confusions and corruptions surrounding the term ‘evangelical.’”

Dr. Crouse said, “The select group drafting the manifesto apparently excludes traditional conservative, pro-life and pro-family evangelical voices. Further, the timing of the manifesto — at the end of primary election season and just before the general election in a presidential election year — makes this a decidedly political document when millions of evangelical votes are at stake.

“The manifesto seems to be targeting evangelicals by blurring the distinctions between liberal and conservatives, producing an amalgam that will become as impotent and barren in the 21st century as most mainline protestant churches became in the 20th century. Polls indicate that the majority of evangelical believers hold mainstream views and attend church weekly. They believe that the Bible is the Word of God and that personal faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation. They oppose both homosexual ‘marriage’ and ‘civil unions’ as undermining marriage, and they believe that abortion should be illegal.

“The term ‘evangelical’ means a Biblical worldview and dictates a philosophical/theological perspective on the timeless moral issues of Scripture. Those positions ought to be clear and unequivocal, rather than muddied by sophisticated rhetoric and clever obfuscation. The subtle danger is, as the old axiom states: ‘Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything,’” Crouse concluded.

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