If you're coming over from RCP and looking for the post on contemporary evangelicalism, look to the "featured post" list on the right. 

I'm still learning my way around the townhall blog system, and still finding some glitches.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but click on the article title to the right and it should take you there.  Thanks for coming!  My goal is to provide at least one post per day analyzing the arguments for a key political issue. 

UPDATE: As if to prove the points I make in "Harvey Cox Swings and Misses," a piece by Barack Obama appears in today's USA Today.  Read it here. 

Obama's claim that when religious people engage politically they must articulate and defend their views in language and forms of reasoning that are shared and publicly-available--while attractive and in line with the "public theology" movement among the religious left--is ultimately not persuasive.  If a person wishes to engage in political discourse, and simply explain that he or she is motivated by his own internal religious convictions, then that is a perfectly legitimate course of action.  There is no responsibility for all people to translate their beliefs into public forms before they can act in the political sphere. 

In terms of the claims I made in my piece, here is the key paragraph from Obama's article.  Note how he reduces conservative evangelicalism to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, exaggerates their claims, and then suggests that they are only concerned with "issues of abortion and gay marriage."  This is the same pap that's passed around where I live and work, in the circles of liberal academia, and it's so obviously wrong that it reaches, I believe, the level of outright dishonesty:

"This gap [between those who attend church regularly and vote Republican, and those who do not and vote Democrat] has long been exploited by conservative leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who tell evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting that religious Americans care only about issues such as abortion and gay marriage."