Evangelicals appreciated August 2, 2011
Posted by Hampton Morgan in General.trackback
Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, took the occasion of John Stott’s death to write some nice things about some evangelicals. More than anyone else on the op-ed or any other pages of the Times, Kristof writes positively about the important work being done by Christian missionaries and aid workers in places where human suffering and degradation are most intense.
Stott was a significant figure in global evangelicalism for half a century. His earlier writings especially helped define the movement and influenced a fair number of us on this side of the Atlantic, though Stott was British and wrote with a kind of C.S. Lewis erudition and reserve. American evangelicalism has always had its scholarly side, but the movement unfortunately became defined, at least in the public mind, by its television personalities. Men like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell did and said things that diminished evangelicalism and, for that matter, Christianity. Nicholas Kristof, to no one’s surprise, makes note of this.
But Kristof gets out more than most secularists who write for the Times. He travels often to places like Darfur, Somalia and the slums of Bangkok — places where people are starving, being persecuted for their ethnicity or sold as sex slaves. Kristof gets to observe first-hand the vital work being done by Christian NGOs — many of them evangelical in theology — to alleviate suffering and make the world a better place. And he writes about it, warmly but fairly.
On his blog Kristof explained why he had written his Sunday column:
…I hadn’t intended to write a column for Sunday. But then I saw that John Stott had died, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to write about him and evangelicals more broadly — hence my Sunday column on the subject. We in the op-ed world don’t write about religion perhaps as much as we should: it’s a huge force shaping society and policy, and yet rarely makes the op-ed pages. And evangelicals in particular, especially serious ones, tend to be neglected since there are so few evangelicals in major news organizations. About one-third of America is evangelical, yet you’d be hard pressed to find many (with the exception of black evangelicals, whose politics are very different from white evangelicals) in leading news organizations.
To read Kristof’s Sunday column about John Stott and evangelicals, click here.
