Saturday, September 22, 2007

Neoconned Christian Coalitions; What is Their Value?

(By the way, I have an answer for the question raised in this post title. But I'm hoping some of you will offer your own opinion. I'll share my answer later.)

John Savage has a very correct post up this morning concerning the nature of Christian leadership coalitions to take neoconservative postions on the different and various issues facing the nation.

You need to read John's entry because mine is going to view the subject from something of a different angle...

Particularly, John speaks of the "Forgotten Americans Coalition," consisting of various big-name leaders within the Christian political movement, Pat Robertson of CBN, Don Wildmon of AFA, et al.

With regard to Wildmon, I get his AFA newsletter, and as I said in my comments to John's post, I tend to disagree with Wildmon's approach more than I agree with it. But Wildmon is a good example of another problem I have with these groups in that they pay no mind, in my experience, to concerns with their policies offered them of their readers.

Indeed, I personally have had much more success, by a long shot even, raising concerns with elected officials at the State and national levels of government than with these organizations and their policies. I could give you numerous examples of what I'm talking about, but suffice it to say that if I express a concern, or numerous concerns, with one of my U.S. Senators for example, most of the time I can count on the fact that their office, someone in their office, is going to respond to my concerns, and in a very detailed fashion. In other words, they're going to respond most of the time, by my experience, in a fashion something like this: "here's the concern you raise with this issue; and this is how I would answer you..."

In contrast, I've raised numerous concerns with numbers of these organizations before, and generally speaking I can expect to get no response from them. If I do happen to get an occasional response, it's one of those kinds of replies you'd expect to get from your elected officials, i.e., "Thank you for your interest in this issue. Your opinion is very important to me ... Would you consider supporting my campaign for re-election with a generous love offering. The Lord will bless you." lol

But seriously, I would like to know whether any of you have had the same kinds of experiences. Or is it just me that these Christian organizations are ignoring? I finally just gave up on expressing concerns with these groups. What's the point?

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