Can't we all just get along?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof typically writes on the intersection of poverty, economics, disease, and war in Africa. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 (his second, in fact) for his reporting of the Darfur genocide in the Sudan. I find his reporting on various crises in Africa to be compelling, and I think Christians in particular can benefit from the way in which he raises awareness of issues such as the AIDS crisis and endemic poverty.

Mr. Kristof's column in the Times today, entitled, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love," is an interesting one, because he is arguing that liberals ought to realize how much they hold in common with Christian evangelicals. Recent surveys show that - surprise, surprise - evangelicals care about issues like poverty, malaria, AIDS, and climate change. It is as if Kristof opened up the paper one day and discovered that evangelical Christianity is not some monolithic politico-religious movement that slavishly follows commands from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And what is more, Mr. Kristof seems to believe that this is a brand new development.

If I knew Mr. Kristof, I'd give him a copy of Richard Heitzenrater's excellent study of a certain little evangelical movement known as Methodism, entitled, Wesley and the People Called Methodists. In that book, he'd see how an evangelical Anglican minister named John Wesley was caring for issues such as poverty, addiction, disease, and slavery long before Jim Wallis made evangelical social activism fashionable.

Many people today would argue that the United Methodist Church is far from evangelical, but that's not entirely true. Large, long-standing institutions like the UMC go through phases, and at least for most of its history, the UMC (and its predecessor bodies) has been thoroughly evangelical - in the best sense of the term. There are large swaths of the church that embrace a Wesleyan evangelicalism today, and if anything, that portion is on the increase. But then again, to understand what that means (and why it is much different than the evangelicalism of a Robertson or a Falwell), one has to treat evangelicalism as a nuanced phenomenon. And that, friends, is something that neither Mr. Kristof nor many other secular liberals do very well.

There is one aspect to Mr. Kristof's column that is particularly revealing. He criticizes the intolerance that tolerance-loving liberals often show toward religious people, particularly in that such intolerance often obscures the commonalities that do exist. But the whole point of his article is to say, "Hey, we can like evangelicals. They're more like us than we thought!" Such a sentiment is not actually demonstrating the tolerance Mr. Kristof advocates. It is only arguing for the acceptance of those parts of the Christian faith that happen to look similar to liberal politics. My guess is that if the topic were to turn to an issue such as abortion, for instance, his tone would change markedly. The acceptance Mr. Kristof is wanting is not based on a shared conception of the good for human beings; it is rather based only on the belief that people of faith have finally "come around" to the point of view that was "right" all along. And who said evangelicals were the only ones interested in conversion?

Christians who are truly serious about their faith, meanwhile, will continue holding views they believe are in conformity with the gospel we have been given, whether or not those views meet the approval of the liberal or conservative intelligentsia of the land.