And Mark Hatfield, RIP

In addition to John Stott, another hero to evangelical Protestants died in recent days: Senator Mark Hatfield.  There were almost no openly declared, non-Southern evangelicals in Congress in the mid-1970s, and so Hatfield (like John Anderson) was someone to whom my Midwestern Republican evangelical family pointed with pride, even when he turned against Vietnam while they still defended it.  Christianity Today describes his set of passionate faith-based beliefs and touches on why almost no politician today reflects the same mix:

For nearly four decades, perhaps American evangelicals' most prominent and admired politician was a man associated with liberal politics, one of the country's leading voices against the Vietnam War and military spending, and a critic of the nascent religious right.

As the Vietnam era waned, Hatfield maintained his opposition to military funding, especially nuclear arms. But he was also staunchly pro-life, introducing the first constitutional amendment on abortion, and joining Rep. Henry Hyde in prohibiting federal funding for such procedures. But as his influence as a senior senator grew—he twice became chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee—his presence as an evangelical icon diminished somewhat.

"Part of the issue is the political parties hardened in the mid to late '70s," said [David] Swartz, whose history of the Evangelical Left will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press next year. "It wasn't clear where they would come out on abortion, for example. So an evangelical progressive could function in that earlier system better than they could later, in the '80s and '90s...."

And here's a reflection by an evangelical leader on Hatfield's "freedom and joy and humility" as a politician of Christian conviction.  For those interested in church-state issues, Hatfield was also the prime legislative mover behind the 1984 Equal Access Act, which allowed religious student groups to meet on high school campuses on equal terms as other student clubs. 

Tom