Christianity after the Christian Right

An excerpt from Tim Keller's talk at the 2013 Faith Angle Forum.  He's explaining how younger evangelicals are divorcing political conservatism from theological conservatism:

Tim Keller

It is very hard to get, I think, nationalism out of the Bible, especially when nationalism is constantly being undermined, especially in the New Testament. And even in the [Old Testament]— the Christian understanding of the Old Testament was that the people of God existed as a nation state for a period of time, and now the people of God is actually a kind of multi-ethnic international fellowship.

And so at that point, that’s why when Jesus says, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, God the things that are God’s”, that is a change, and saying Christians don’t exist as a nation state anymore, and they shouldn’t exist as a nation state anymore. That you’re a Christian first, and you’re white or black or Asian or Hispanic second.

You’re a Christian first, and you’re from Ohio or Pennsylvania or Texas second. And when you do that — and I think that’s what Ephesians is all about — when you start to read the Bible through, on the one hand, it looks liberal in those areas. It is not great on nationalism, and it’s not great on keeping all of your money for yourself. It is big, big, big on helping the poor.

And in a NYT piece on evangelicals' support for immigration reform, Molly Worthen tracks the same generational shift:

There are signs that evangelicals’ softening on immigration reform reflects a changing theology of sin and Christian obligation: a growing appreciation of how unjust social and legal institutions and the brutality of global capitalism trap the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses. This may be particularly true of younger evangelicals who are disillusioned with their parents’ Christian right. 

In 2011, when Carl Ruby was an administrator at the conservative Baptist Cedarville University, in Ohio, he helped students organize a conference on immigration — and he was struck by the change between his generation and the next. “I grew up at a time when stuff like this would have been called the Social Gospel, and we would have left it to mainline groups. Our emphasis was all on evangelism,” he told me. “To this generation, it’s not an either-or choice. They view work on issues of social justice as a form of evangelism.”