Evangelicals responsible for Obama victory

Here's the single most important takeaway from Tuesday's election: evangelical voters are responsible, all by themselves, for putting Sen. Barack Obama into the White House.

A mentor of mine was fond of saying that the church is the secret government of the world, based on Jesus' teaching that his followers are the salt of the earth, arresting the spread of decay, and the light of the world, bringing illumination to a darkened and deceived humanity.

As the church goes, he believed, so the world goes.

According to exit polling data, Sen. Obama, a supporter of unlimited abortion rights and the radical homosexual agenda, did not win a majority of evangelicals in any state in the Union.

Overall, 74% of self-identified evangelical or born-again Christians voted for Sen. McCain, who has a 100% voting record on the pro-life issue and supported the state marriage amendments which were on the ballot in Arizona, California and Florida, all of which won decisively. One quarter of evangelicals voted for Sen. Obama.

In my home state of Idaho, 80% of evangelicals voted for the McCain-Palin ticket, while just 19% voted for the Obama-Biden ticket.

Two things are particularly noteworthy. One, it's amazing all by itself that 25% of evangelicals found some way to justify voting for a presidential candidate who supported infanticide while a state senator in Illinois, wants to overturn every pro-life law in the land as his first order of presidential business, and calls the Defense of Marriage Act an "abhorrent" law which he wants to repeal as soon as he can.

One can only wonder what kind of teaching these evangelicals are getting on morality in public policy from their pulpits. Have they been told that the Bible teaches that, according to Psalm 139 and Luke 1, a woman carries a baby in her womb, and not a blob of tissue? Have they been taught that the Scriptures teach in Genesis 1, Matthew 19, and 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and that the Scriptures teach in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 5 that homosexual behavior is contrary to nature?

Secondly, it's clear that the simplest path toward recapturing America's moral compass is to create more and better instructed evangelicals.

Evangelicals now comprise 26% of American voters, meaning that of the 120,659,318 votes cast, 31,371,423 of them were cast by evangelicals. This means, bottom line, that 7,842,856 evangelicals cast their votes for Obama.

Sen. Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote was 7,576,856. This, you will note, is less than the number of evangelical votes for Obama. The bottom line, then, is that if all evangelicals had voted according to biblical standards of morality, Sen. McCain would have won the election by 266,000 votes.

Thus the most radical, left-leaning president America has ever had has evangelicals to thank for his elevation to the highest office in the world. He has been put into White House by evangelicals. Evangelicals all by themselves had the power to keep the most liberal senator in United States history out of the Oval Office and did not do so.

If evangelicals had cast their votes according to what they claim are their most deeply held convictions, we would now be talking about Sen. McCain's choice of cabinet members rather than fretting about how it will be possible to stop the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual juggernaut that will be unleashed on America on January 20.

And even assuming voting patterns remained the same, if evangelicals consisted of 37.5% of the electorate instead of just 25%, McCain also would have won. Under that scenario, McCain would have received almost 34 million votes from evangelicals, with Obama receiving just over 11 million, and the difference of 22.5 million votes would have been enough to overcome the 7.5 million vote margin that Obama received on Tuesday.

Bottom line: if we want to salvage the future of this country, all we need are more evangelicals.

The most patriotic thing we can do, both for the kingdom of God and the United States, is to bring our family members and friends into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Evangelism, in other words, is not only our spiritual duty, it is our patriotic duty.

If each of us brings one soul into the kingdom of God over the next four years, the faith community will double in size, and even if teaching in the church does not improve, candidates who respect the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of American history and culture will easily be elevated to office.

Thus the path forward for evangelicals who care deeply about the moral fiber of this country, the soundness of its public policy, and the future of the country we are leaving for our children and grandchildren is quite clear: We should pray and work (in that order) for spiritual awakening to come to America and especially to its churches, and pray and work (in that order) to see that America's pulpits are filled with men who without apology and without compromise preach the word of God.

The Evangelical Electoral Map (Updated) | Christianity Today

© Bryan Fischer

from:
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/fischer/081106