Watch out for stereotypes. Movies and television shows are quick to present religious people, especially Christians as ignorant and irrational and bigoted. Television preachers, outwardly religious politicians and other self-appointed spokespersons for religion have also led to distorted images of the religious. Better to draw your conclusions from neighbors and friends who put their faith into practice in less spectacular, but authentic ways.

As New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof has written…

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

…Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Look, I don’t agree with evangelicals on theology or on their typically conservative views on taxes, health care or Iraq. Self-righteous zealots like Pat Robertson have been a plague upon our country, and their initial smugness about AIDS (which Jerry Falwell described as “God’s judgment against promiscuity”) constituted far grosser immorality than anything that ever happened in a bathhouse. Moralizing blowhards showed more compassion for embryonic stem cells than for the poor or the sick, and as recently as the 1990s, evangelicals were mostly a constituency against foreign aid.

Yet that has turned almost 180 degrees. Today, many evangelicals are powerful internationalists and humanitarians — and liberals haven’t awakened to the transformation. The new face of evangelicals is somebody like the Rev. Rick Warren, the California pastor who wrote “The Purpose Driven Life.”

[You may] criticize Catholic leaders and other conservative Christians for their hostility toward condoms, a policy that has gravely undermined the fight against AIDS in Africa. But while robust criticism is fair, scorn is not.

In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians. In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.

Feb. 3, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03kristof.html

Responses to Kristoff columns on Evangelicals:

Plenty of people were indignant that I had anything nice to say about evangelicals. For example, Alan from Plainfield, N.J., writes: “Evangelicals stir the pot, destroy traditional societies, create cultural and economic divides, maintain poverty to enable good works, and try to unload their misguided deistic views on their ‘wards.’ Can’t we get this done without religion?”

No, Alan, I don’t think so. The fact is that in poor countries, conservative Christians are making a huge and positive difference. You get some American yuppie aid workers in the capitals, but when you find a clinic in the middle of nowhere in Africa, it’s likely to be run by and financed by a church in Iowa or Alabama. One of my gripes is that New Yorkers sit around wine-and-cheese parties bemoaning the situation in the third world, but they don’t actually do much of anything about it. I disagree with the religious right, but those are the folks who are contributing 10 percent of their incomes to charity and financing many of the schools, orphanages and hospitals in Malawi or Sierra Leone.