MSNBC has a good piece up on how the "Politics of Jesus" are not as clearly defined as they used to be in Evangelical Circles.  Check it out.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15566654/site/newsweek/

If you just want to read some of the highlights you can click on the "continue" section below.

But now, more than three decades after Roe v. Wade propelled religious conservatives fully into the arena, a new generation of evangelical believers is pressing beyond the religious right of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, trying to broaden the movement’s focus from the familiar wars about sex to include issues of social and economic justice. The result is a new hour of decision for evangelicals: How much do they have to show for the decades of activism? And if they are to turn from what Roger Williams called "the garden of Christ’s church" to fight the battles of "the wilderness of the world," what should those battles be?

……………….

Some Christians, exhausted by divisive wedge politics, are going back to the Bible and embracing a wider-ranging agenda, one that emphasizes reaching out to the poor and disenfranchised. Almost unanimously, these evangelicals cite as a model Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. Members of his church sign up for missionary stints in Africa, resolve to feed the homeless and see themselves as part of a global Christian community. Over the past six months, Warren has added his name to a public letter condemning abortion and embryonic-stem-cell research, as well as to one demanding an end to atrocities in Darfur and another denouncing torture. "Rick Warren … has a lightness of being," says John DiIulio, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and former Bush White House staffer. "How do you get coordinates for a guy who talks about poverty like a liberal Catholic?"

……………

Fast-forward to 1976, the first election after Watergate, when Jimmy Carter—who, incidentally, had participated in Graham’s crusade work—ran on a platform of personal integrity and honesty. "I will never lie to you," he said. One afternoon, before a fund-raiser, Carter told a Washington Post reporter that he had been "born again." He had realized, he said, that he "lacked something very precious—a complete commitment to Christ, a presence of the Holy Spirit in my life in a profound and personal way." In subsequent interviews, he said he prayed to God "not continually but many times a day."

In the North, Carter’s God talk was seen as an oddity, but in the South it meant something. Tourists and reporters mobbed the little church where he and his wife, Rosalynn, attended services and where he taught Sunday school. Carter decisively won the South that year.

By the time he ran for re-election in 1980, the world had changed, but no one knew it yet. Jerry Rafshoon remembers the story well. He had quit his post as Carter’s White House communications director to run the media campaign in the president’s bid for re-election. Rafshoon wasn’t worried about the South; campaign dollars would be better spent elsewhere. Then one day early in the fall, Rafshoon received a disturbing call. A preacher named Jerry Falwell, with an outfit called the Moral Majority, had spent massive sums on anti-Carter radio ads in the South. They were "saying that Jimmy Carter isn’t a Christian, and there are homosexuals in the Oval Office and all kinds of crap," Rafshoon says. "Rosalynn went to church one time and came back in tears—a bunch of women were picketing her, saying your husband is not a Christian. We lost most of the South."

The Moral Majority had been launched in 1979 as a political-action committee, an alliance of Christian conservatives—evangelicals and Catholics, Washington types and, of course, Falwell—who wanted to crush Carter and all he stood for. The stated agenda was clear: pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-Israel and for a strong national defense. It was against gays, drugs, pornography and the Equal Rights Amendment. Ronald Reagan’s dubious evangelical credentials—divorced, movie star, sporadic churchgoer—didn’t matter. He was deeply and properly conservative.

……………..

Bill Hybels, who leads the Willow Creek organization of megachurches—an association of 11,000 churches in 45 countries—has recently befriended the Irish rock star Bono. At Willow Creek’s annual meeting last summer, the highlight was a video of Hybels and Bono hashing over the fate of the world. Bono quoted Scripture (Luke, chapter 4); the crowd wept. Cally Parkinson, who runs the Willow Creek media-relations department, was there. As she was leaving, she overheard one pastor say to another, "I went in there wondering if Bono was a Christian, and I came out wondering if I was."

……….