There is an utter disconnect between what I hear other people – mostly in the media – say about evangelical conservatives, and what I’ve experienced living in and among them for nearly three decades on this planet. I hear how intolerant and close-minded this group supposedly is, and I sit and absorb such attacks with a blank look on my face. They bear no resemblance to the environment I was reared in.
The people who instilled in me the values of tolerance, compassion, service, and justice were the same who taught me personal responsibility, the wonder of free enterprise, the importance of private charity, and the sobering implications of living in an imperfect, fallen world.
As my favorite writer G.K Chesterton would put it: I did not create a conservative worldview – God and Western Civilization made it, and they made me.
I wanted to share with you a compilation of pro-Romney/Ryan “blurbs” that I’ve assembled from some of the best and brightest evangelicals that I personally know. It’s not meant as a definitive, case-closed, “See, we’re not all lock-step knuckle-draggers” argument in favor of evangelicals everywhere. It’s simply a sampling of the evangelical world I know and am proud to claim a stake in.
You can read the entire list here, but I’ll leave you with a portion of one in particular (from my second favorite writer, Mark Steyn):
I don’t know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won’t even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark after the storm, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay….In different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the world’s superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.”
