evangelicals and Obama

For my course on 'Dogmatics and Politics', I'm writing a paper on evangelical support for the Obama and the Democrat party in the 2008 election. As a case study I looked at the Matthew 25 Network, a PAC (political action committee) that was run by evangelicals in explicit support of Obama, and below is a section I wrote about the way they designed and worded their campaign.

"What distinguishes the Matthew 25 Network from other examples of the evangelical shift to the left, is that because it is aligned to a specific party and claims the alignment as the direct conclusion of their theological beliefs, they need to give a theological rationale for Obama’s policies. Regarding life with dignity, they quote Obama saying that “As children of God, we believe in the worth and dignity of every human person.” On the necessity of arranging health cover for every America, Obama claims it is a “moral commitment.” About poverty, Obama says “we need to heed the biblical call to care for `the least of these' and lift the poor out of despair” a direct reference to Matthew 25. And again, with regard to environmental policy, Obama is quoted as saying that what he “draw[s] from the Genesis story is the importance of us being good stewards of the land.” The prominence of this selection of quotations is made to encourage evangelicals to see a direct link between the bible, their personal faith, and Obama’s policies. Further, the overarching theme of judgement in Matthew 25, that those who do not care for the ‘least of these’ are condemned, carries with it a psychological force amongst evangelicals as people concerned with their salvation. The allusion is weakly and implicitly, yet persistently, making the claim that to not vote for Obama would be to not care for the least of these, and land oneself on the side of the goats. The ultimate point the Matthew 25 campaign is driving toward is the conviction that if one is a biblical, committed and honest Christian, one must acknowledge that Obama’s policies best represent the political application of the gospel message, and therefore if one is to be faithful to the gospel message, only a vote for Obama is consistent with evangelical faith."


I later critique this method as follows:

"For this reason the Barmen Declaration denies that the Church “could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.” In light of this dogmatic statement, a critique of the work of the Matthew 25 Network presents itself forcefully. It was seen from the analysis of the language from the campaign website that more than congruency was drawn between faithfulness to the gospel and voting for Obama; rather, it implied that faithfulness to the gospel necessitated a vote for Obama, and the reversal that seems to have taken place is that biblical phrases and imagery are being employed ‘in the service of arbitrarily chosen plans’ (which a secular Democrat platform must be) – and this is the very thing that Barmen rejects. The positive endorsement of Obama by an explicitly evangelical group seeks to so identify his agenda with the gospel message, that the gospel message is for practical purposes exhausted in Obama’s political policies, and thus no space is left for the gospel to critique and call to account the Obama administration. If that is this situation, then a dogmatic criticism of the Matthew 25 Network would be that it has put limitations and restrictions on the gospel that prevent complete faithfulness to the task of proclamation that the Church has been given."