A terrible question now stalks this land: Who will step forward to lead America forward out of the bitterness and divisions over race and over religion in public life? Both race and religion require healing and civility for their resolution, but in the present bitter climate, each has been used to exacerbate the other, and civility has been shouldered aside as weak and ineffectual. Who, then, will deliver the Gettysburg Address of the American “culture wars”? Evangelicals might seem an unlikely source of such a possibility. Recently they have been viewed as the problem, not the answer. But a newly published Evangelical Manifesto represents just such a promising offer.
(Os Guinness, an author and social critic, is one of the drafters of An Evangelical Manifesto (http://www.evangelicalmanifesto.com) His most recent book is “The Case for Civility-and Why Our Future Depends on It.”)
