Religion & Law

From Christianity Today:

Richard Cizik resigned Wednesday night as vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) during a week of growing uproar over his comments that he is shifting his views on same-sex unions.

Cizik later apologized and said he was opposed to civil unions as well as gay marriage, but it's not clear how convincing the retraction could be.  The resignation of Cizik, the strong evangelical advocate for anti-global-warming policies, could end up meaning any of several things.  (1) The movement to mobilize evangelicals to take steps against global warming will lose credibility because one of its main voices has been discredited for suggesting he was moving outside the evangelical consensus against same-sex unions.  (2) This is a sign of how strong that evangelical consensus remains.  Or (3) Cizik's (temporary?) shift is a sign of where more and more evangelicals will go in the future.  Or all of the above.

On the same radio program, Cizik also expressed openness to government-supported contraception to reduce abortions, saying that evangelicals "are not Catholics who oppose contraception per se."  But the Christianity Today story suggests (though it does not explicitly say) that it was the civil-unions remark that caused the greatest disturbance.

Tom B.