Brian McLaren's Open Letter to Conservative Christians in the US

Pastor and Author Brian McLaren asks some important questions to conservative Christians in the United States concerning the current healthcare debate.



He writes:

Although today I would not call myself a political or social conservative, I am grateful for my heritage as an evangelical Christian: My faith is rooted in a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, I honor and seek to live in harmony with the scriptures, and I love to share the good news of God’s love with others. Since my teenage years when I decided to follow Jesus, I have pursued wholehearted discipleship, and my life has been shaped by that commitment. After completing graduate school and teaching college English, I became a church planter and pastor and served in the same congregation for 24 years.

But for almost that many years, I have been growing more and more deeply troubled by the way so many from my heritage in conservative Christianity – in its evangelical, charismatic, and Roman Catholic streams – have allowed themselves to be spiritually formed by various conservative political and economic ideologies. It’s been disturbing to see how many Christians have begun to follow and trust leaders who live more by political/media/ideological codes than by moral/spiritual/biblical ones.

As a result, I sometimes think that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Fox News may now influence many conservative evangelicals, charismatics, and Catholics more than Billy Graham, Rick Warren, T.D. Jakes, Pope Benedict, or even the four gospels.

Now in a free country, people certainly have the right to choose their ideology. But Christians of all sorts, I think we all can agree, have a special calling – to increasingly harmonize our lives (including our lives as citizens) with the teaching and example of Jesus. My concern is that many of my sisters and brothers, without realizing it, have begun seeing Jesus and the faith through the lens of a neo-conservative political framework, thus reducing their vision of Jesus and his essential message of the kingdom of God. As a result, too many of us are becoming more and more zealous conservatives, but less and less Christ-like Christians, and many don’t seem to notice the difference.

More here.