Not mine since I’m still preparing for my doctrine of God final:

In the end, the document seems to be saying something like this: “We’re tired of being lumped in with the fundamentalists, who are always angry and rattling on about America being a ‘Christian nation’ and that kind of junk. We’re tired of being treated as the lapdogs of the Republican party. We’re followed the Republicans all these years because of one issue — abortion — and while we don’t want to abandon our pro-life stance, we think that we’ve ignored a lot of other Christian values and convictions in order to get leverage on this one matter, and now we’re thinking that that wasn’t such a good idea. And by the way, some of us have been Democrats all along. But we’re not telling you how to vote, so don’t jump to any conclusions. We just want to be seen as polite and reasonable participants in the American public sphere, unlike the red-faced old dudes you always see on TV presented as ‘the evangelical voice.’ We’re sick and tired of all that.”

I share many of the feelings that prompted this document, I admit, but I think this so-called Manifesto raises more questions than it answers, and creates more confusions than it resolves. The authors call themselves “representative evangelicals,” but are they? Or do they represent a highly educated, culturally elite subset of evangelicals? If they want to claim the name “evangelical” and deny it to fundamentalists, then what happens if the people they call fundamentalists want to call themselves evangelicals? Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (an organ of the Religious Right if there ever was one) calls itself the world’s largest evangelical university — should it stop using that adjective? (“Evangelical,” I mean, not “largest.”)

I think from the little I’ve been reading about the document, it’s written to someone like me who is tired of Christians trying to reshape the Republican party in their image and the Republican party letting them because it helps them obtain power. To some that means abandoning it altogether and joining the Democrats or admitting that you’re already a Democrat. For me that’s a bridge too far to cross because I really am a Republican. I have no intention of voting for people who will fund abortions, raise my taxes, pull out of Iraq in defeat and spend at a greater clip than even the Republicans could imagine. Not to mention how bloated the federal government would be when they were done. No, I can’t see jumping from the pan into the fire.