TEST CASE

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Come to find out that Christian leftist web site Sojourners just made a few enemies. On the Christian left:

It can be argued that Mother’s Day is the most popular secular holiday in our churches. Attendance increases, special music is featured, pastors pay particular attention to crafting messages that affirm the place of motherhood in keeping families and communities faithfully knit together. So it seemed fitting that Believe Out Loud, a trans-denominational effort to promote LGBT equality in mainline Protestant congregations, focused on Mother’s Day to launch its new campaign to invite one million believers to “sign up” for full LGBT equality in our churches and society-at-large.

To get the word out, Believe Out Loud organizers backed the launch of this viral video with a multi-layered, web-based advertising strategy that included a significant ad buy on the Sojourners web site and email newsletters—home to one of the largest networks of progressive Christians in the U.S.

So, you can imagine our dismay when Sojourners refused to run our ads. In a written statement, Sojourners said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to decline. Sojourners position is to avoid taking sides on this issue. In that care [sic], the decision to accept advertising may give the appearance of taking sides.”

The left is definitely angry; read the comments at the end of this piece and over at Naughton’s here and here. But I think I see Sojourners working. One of the accusastions regularly thrown at conservative Christians is that they overemphasize this or that issue, abortion, say, or homosexual activity, to the exclusion of everything else in the Bible.

Perhaps Wallis felt that running this ad would have identified Sojourners too closely with that faction of the Christian left for whom the correct position on homosexuality is the only determinant of morality. Because let’s face it, to guys like Jim Naughton, you can advocate just about anything you care to as long as you’re correct on The Issue.

It’s entirely possible that Jim Wallis realizes that life is a lot more complicated than that. And that in the Church, he has to work with people with views opposed to his own adopted those views because they are genuinely convinced that those views are right.

UPDATE: Man, the lefties are BENT.