Evangelicals in massive phone campaign get their leaders to back away from endorsing amnesty

It looks as though evangelicals are not the open borders liberals we’ve been saying they are. To the contrary. Roy Beck writes in an e-mail from NumbersUSA:

FRIENDS, LET’S DECLARE A LITTLE VICTORY

I think all of us will want to thank the approximately one-third of our NumbersUSA members who are evangelicals.

Roy Beck

They have done a huge amount of faxing and phone calling the last two weeks to stop their denominations from helping Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) build a new coalition to pass an amnesty.

The results are that they have helped crumble a major pillar of Schumer’s plans to pass an amnesty this winter. After looking like they were backing the amnesty, most of the evangelical denominations are now refusing to sign an endorsement.

Hooray!

Read this blog for the details of the overall fight and the victory thus far.

(We still have the problem that most Mainline Protestant, Catholic and Jewish national groups continue to endorse amnesty. If you are a member of any of those and want to challenge them—or if you are an evangelical and want to make sure this current victory stays in the win column—please be sure you have taken this short Religion Survey. That will allow you to see special faxing opportunities.)

OVERWHELMING EVANGELICAL ENDORSEMENT WAS KEY TO SCHUMER’S AMNESTY PLAN

When the late Sen. Ted Kennedy had to give up his 45-year Senate leadership on immigration, Schumer took over. He immediately revealed that he was going to do three things differently than Kennedy in order to pass the amnesty that Kennedy had failed to pass the last 8 years.

Read my blog for Schumer’s first two changes. But the third change was to enlist the elites of the evangelical Christian movement to be an entirely new face for amnesty.

Earlier this month, it looked like Schumer had pulled off a miracle. He assembled a Senate hearing panel of big-name evangelicals, including the president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to endorse his plan to legalize most illegal aliens and to greatly increase the number of foreign workers allowed in the future.

The NAE, with 42 member denominations, is the most conspicuous evangelical presence on Capitol Hill. [LA asks: Just one evangelical group has forty two denominations? How many evangelical denominations are there all together?]

The NAE president told Schumer that the NAE’s endorsement of legalization and increased foreign worker importation was “without dissent.”

We put that out to all NumbersUSA activists who are members of those 42 denominations and let them notify their national leaders how they felt about their decision to manipulate theology to make a case to favor illegal aliens over unemployed Americans.

Denominations immediately began to post disclaimers on their websites and distance themselves from the NAE. Some of them provided some pretty strong biblical and theological reasons AGAINST amnesty.

So far, only 11 of the 42 member denominations have been willing to sign onto the NAE pro-amnesty document.

What a victory. Nobody can even contemplate attempting to claim evangelical support for amnesty in the future.

Click here to see the list of 11 evangelical denominations that are lobbying for amnesty and more foreign workers (and also the list of the 31 evangelical denominations which resisted being pulled onto the amnesty bandwagon).

We are continually posting new actions on your NumbersUSA Action Board. Please check to see if you have done all you can do this week.

THANKS,

[end of Beck e-mail]

Clark Coleman writes:

When the NAE vote was taken, Roy Beck’s blog entry claimed that, according to polls over the years, evangelical voters are more opposed to amnesty than the public at large. I was going to question your generalizations about evangelicals in general in your blog entry on this same NAE vote, but Beck did not provide any hard polling data.

In this new story, it does appear that evangelicals spoke loudly and clearly to their leadership.

It makes sense that evangelicals oppose amnesty at greater than the national average. After all, everyone cannot be below the average, right? Arguably, Jews and Catholics and mainline Protestants and business owners and Asians and Hispanics and libertarians are all below average in their resistance to amnesty. If evangelicals are as well, then I guess we would need 100 percent opposition from non-libertarian, non-liberal atheists to make up the difference. The math doesn’t add up without evangelicals being as conservative on this issue as on many others.

Let’s not blame all evangelicals for “leaders” and “spokesmen” who are often unrepresentative.

Terry Morris writes:

Don’t you just love the way that the Atheist-Darwinists, the HBDers and whatever will take bad information like that concerning the position of evangelicals on immigration and run with it all the way to the goal line (as in the thread at Mangan’s) to support their goofed up view that Christianity is the root cause of the destruction of Western civilization? The mistake that the HBDers and the Schumerites make in common is in assuming that individual Christians and the various individual church bodies they form necessarily hold to a view enunciated by their so-called national “leaders.” I said the other day under the other thread that this isn’t so. And indeed, I have a newsflash for all of the anti-Christian “conservatives” out there—you can’t possibly save America from the destructive influence of liberalism without Christians. But we can do so without you.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2009 01:05 AM | Send