A few days ago, I blogged about the recent Prison Fellowship ruling from Iowa. Chuck Colson weighed in on the ruling in his Back Page commentary in this month’s Christianity Today (once again, nuts to Christianity Today for its web-publication delay that doesn’t facilitate timely blog linking to current articles!).
Overall, I think Colson’s commentary is reasonably good. He focuses on the court’s ham-handed, shallow treatment of evangelicalism, which is a major flaw in the opinion. He also appropriately counsels us to look inward concerning the stereotypes about evangelicalism that the court’s opinion could perpetuate. As he puts it:
The critical question is, do we play into the stereotypes, or de we reflect our rich heritage of abolishing the slave trade, defending human rights, and founding hospitals? This case is a challenge to define evangelicalism, no less before the bar of public opinion than before the bar of justice.
Many amens to that! I wish, though, that Colson would rotate that inward eye just a few more degrees to examine the problem of government funding for outreach programs like Prison Fellowship’s Innerchange Initiative. The Iowa case is problematic for many of the reasons Colson mentions, but the wisdom of tying evangelism to government money needs to be explored in more depth.