And you thought "Evangelicals" believed in forgiveness

As I have noted previously, some "Evangelicals" have responded to the Manhattan Declaration with a smugness that is, unfortunately, all too characteristic of their sectarian tendencies. A new low may have been reached, however, with the comments of John Stackhouse. Micah Watson highlights a particularly grotesque cheap shot from Stackhouse against one of the evangelical community's most respected leaders.

Here's what he says in diminishing some of the signatories of the document:

and Charles Colson, another evangelical whose impressive Prison Fellowship ministry arose out of his previous political career, a career that by any account was extremist and ended in the extremes of Watergate disgrace and a prison term (and therefore not the political expertise one might hope for behind such a document).

Now there are two ways he might believe Colson is not qualified to be a leading voice in such a document. First, he might think Colson just doesn't know enough about politics. Colson may be a nice fellow, he's done some admirable work in prisons, but he's not quite up to snuff intellectually and doesn't know enough to be an exemplar. Or, Stackhouse might think that Colson's behavior as a public figure in the Nixon White House was so morally bad that we should not think he's a voice worth hearing. So Colson might be intellectually lacking, or morally lacking, or perhaps both, is implied in the snippet.

Let's give Stackhouse the respect afforded to someone who should know better and describe this potshot as risible.

As to the claim that Colson doesn't know enough about politics, surely someone who served closely to a president and subsequently went on to write several books about faith and politics should be presumed to know a bit about how the game is played. Colson's charitable and advocacy work alone should shoot down this objection, and Stackhouse acknowledges how impressive Prison Fellowship has been (he could add Justice Fellowship also). Stackhouse has to know this, so one suspects it's the moral objection.

Unfortunately, this objection is even worse, for Stackhouse leaves out the fact that Colson was not a Christian when he was a determined Republican operative who would run over his grandmother for the president. Though the story has been part of a best-selling book and rather well-known in evangelical circles, Colson served his time in prison, because a Christian, and has repented of his past behavior from the early 1970s.As he has noted wryly from time to time when asked about political matters, he still cannot vote.

Is Stackhouse serious in thinking that a Christian who has repented of misdeeds done before he came to Christ over thirty-five years ago is thus disqualified from having something to say about matters of utmost moral, political, and cultural concern? That when we think of the legacy and leadership of Colson we should focus primarily on Watergate, and not how God used Colson through subsequent events to have an enormously positive impact in the church, the culture, and in countless prisons?

Surely that's not what he means, and I hope he'll explain himself a little better on that account. His mischaracterization of Colson, George, and others aside, he is in a good position to raise substantive concerns about the document. And that would be a conversation worth having, though I might add it would be a conversation prompted by the Declaration itself. If we can rise to the level of argument and joust with the actual views of our interlocuters, then perhaps it won't be such a waste of time.

Indeed, what does Stackhouse do with a passage like, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17)?