A Huggable Evangelical

By Nicholas Kristof

Sad word today from Washington that Richard Cizik, who helped lead the evangelical Christian movement away from the culture wars and gay-bashing to tackle global poverty and climate change, has been pushed out of his job. Rich had headed the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals, and for many years he had played a critical role in the rebranding of evangelicals.

A few years ago I wrote a column headlined “Hug an Evangelical,” about the way evangelicals were now tackling humanitarian issues like AIDS, Darfur, poverty and religious repression. That column was all about people like Rich who were using the political power of evangelicals to get the White House to pay attention to Sudan, AIDS and malaria. Most liberals are still so distrustful of conservative Christians that they don’t appreciate the significance of that shift, but it’s huge.

Travel through Cambodia, and you see child brothels closed because evangelical groups hounded the U.S. and Cambodian governments to get them shut. Visit southern Africa, and you see people who are alive today only because evangelicals nagged President Bush into launching PEPFAR, his AIDS initiative. And while it’s true that some PEPFAR money has been squandered on abstinence-only programs, that’s only a small piece of the pie (30 percent of prevention funding, or about 10 percent of the overall total). And if we’re going to make further progress on issues that I care deeply about, it will be because of coalitions between bleeding-heart liberals and bleeding-heart evangelicals.

Rich’s downfall came in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, when he said he favored civil unions for gay couples. More conservative evangelicals already regarded him with great suspicion, and that was the last straw. He resigned. I realize that a defense in The New York Times will only confirm the judgment of many conservative Christians that he should have been ousted long ago. But he was a bridge-builder whose legacy is people alive today in remote villages, who would otherwise be dead of AIDS or malaria — and another part of his legacy is the respect that some liberals like myself have for the National Association of Evangelicals. I hope that someone like the Rev. Rick Warren can find a way to use Rich as a new ideological bridge so that left and right can cooperate to accomplish more in the humanitarian arena.