Posted: 11/05/09

Evangelical Left Fawns Over Obama's Nobel – by Mark D. Tooley

The increasingly left-leaning National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) has eagerly embraced President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize as somehow validating the NAE's own impending call for nuclear disarmament.  Ironically, the NAE is moving almost in tandem with its former nemesis, the old Religious Left's National Council of Churches (NCC), which is preparing its own ant-nuke statement for release later this month.  Over 60 years ago the NAE was founded as a more conservative alternative to the NCC.

Apparently the NAE is now eager to echo the liberal Mainline Protestants at the NCC.  "The ambition to free future generations from the fear of indiscriminate destruction is a truly nonpartisan ambition that resonates with our deepest moral convictions," explained NAE board member and Florida mega-church pastor Joel Hunter.  "President Obama is to be congratulated for setting a course so that the generation that had school drills to hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack should be the source of a permanent recess from fear for our grandchildren."

NAE President Leith Anderson further explained:  "I first heard the call for a world free of nuclear weapons from President Ronald Reagan when he addressed the National Association of Evangelicals over twenty-five years ago. The Nobel prize for President Obama acknowledges and perpetuates the Reagan vision."

How "Reagan's vision" is necessarily tied to Obama's Nobel or the NAE's designs for nuclear disarmament is unclear. Reagan's vision called for spending the old Soviet Union into bankruptcy while neutralizing the Soviet nuclear arsenal with a U.S. missile shield that rendered ICBM's strategically irrelevant.  The Cold Warrior President believed negotiated nuclear disarmament was only facilitated by mutual national interests, and could be sustained only by rigorous verification and the implied threat of rearmament.

It's very doubtful that the NAE, ever eager for New York Times and wider cultural approval from secular elites, will be similarly hard-headed and visionary.   Seemingly, NAE has already outsourced its policymaking on nuclear weapons to the new Evangelical Left nuclear disarmament group, The Two Futures Project (2FP).  A primary donor for 2FP seems to be The Ploughshares Fund, the San Francisco-based philanthropy relic from the nuclear freeze protest days of the 1980's.  Apparently, and conveniently, it was 2FP that actually released NAE's official response to Obama's Nobel.  Of course, 2FP's director Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, who prominently spoke at the NAE's recent public policy forum outside Washington, D.C., was quoted at length.

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