Sunday on MSNBC, network contributor and presidential historian Jon Meacham said Democratic nominee Joe Biden was brave to make the 2020 election about morals.
He urged Evangelical voters to focus on the teachings of Jesus during his Sermon on the Mount more than securing conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
Meacham said, “What’s happened with the broad Evangelical politically active Evangelical community really in the last 65 years or so, and it begins I think less with Roe versus Wade and more with the school prayer decision in 1962. I remember going to cover rallies in north Georgia when I was a young reporter, and there were people who would hold—religious activists who would hold up signs that listing divorce rates, abortion rates, crime rates and dated it on a chart that a didn’t start with 1973, but 1962 and the school prayer decision. I think that is why the Supreme Court is so central in the imagination of that politically inclined group of Evangelicals.”
He continued, “My argument to them as a failing and terrible Christian, which I am —Robert Lewis Stevenson once said that the duty of a Christian is not to succeed but to fail cheerfully. Only by that standard am I good at this, but my argument is, shouldn’t we be more focused on the Sermon on the Mount than on the Supreme Court? As a political matter, you don’t need to get that many folks to agree with you, but some people should, and I think it’s brave, honestly, of Vice President Biden to lead with this. To say, this is who I am, and you could take it or leave it, but he’s not going to cede that part of the American character and the American conversation to people of a singular political disposition.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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