In 2005, no less a publication than Christianity Today wrote, "George W. Bush is not Lord ... The American flag is not the Cross. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Creed. 'God Bless America' is not Doxology."

For Christianity Today to have so declared must mean that someone at the time indeed did think all those things - and in fact, that the religious right in the United States had gotten a loud microphone for forty or so years, positioning itself as the Republican Party at prayer.

But with Christianity Today's rejection of the conflation between political party and gospel, clearly something was up. Theologian Scot McKnight called it "the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the twentieth century, a new kind of Christian social conscience."

It appeared that at least some evangelicals had left the right, moving towards an anti-militarist, anti-consumerist focus on poverty relief, environmental protection, immigration reform and racial/religious reconciliation.

People do not often change their minds about things so fundamental as religion or politics. I have spent the last six years reading everything from sermons to blogs and travelling across the United States in an effort to find out what was happening and why.

I discovered that where there had seemingly been a monovocal evangelicalism, there was now robust polyphony. My research eventually resulted in the book The New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good , which is discussed in earlier articles ("Meet America's New Evangelicals" and "Why Evangelical Christians have Left the Right").

Let me touch on a few key findings before moving on to "new evangelical" views on the hot-topic issues of abortion and gay unions.

In numbers, Christians not aligned with the religious right account for roughly 24% of the American population. Subtract the Catholic left and you've got 19% or so distributed among the old (1960s) evangelical left, youth-led progressive/emergent churches, and "red letter" Christians (those who focus on Jesus' words in Scripture, printed in red, and lean toward progressive activism). Finally, there are those who quietly, unspectacularly have broadened their activism beyond that associated with the religious right.

No grassroots shift among millions of people will have one policy position, but there is a kind of family resemblance among "new evangelical" concerns.

One is embrace of church-state separation. In 2008, the Evangelical Manifesto , signed by over seventy evangelicals leaders, stated: "We are firmly opposed to the imposition of theocracy on our pluralistic society." It continued with a call for the

"expansion of our concerns beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and gay marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel ... engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emptiness, by promoting reconciliation, encouraging ethical servant leadership, assisting the poor, caring for the sick, and educating the next generation."

Indeed, this is the second prominent "new evangelical" concern: working towards structural change to extend opportunity to those who have not enjoyed it. This is not simply charity, but the redistribution of opportunity through education, job training, and health care in the United States and abroad.

If you give someone a dollar, that's almsgiving; but if you give her education or marketable skills, or if you develop a program to mentor emerging entrepreneurs, you have made a change that will affect not only her but the local economy. Enough of that and you have accumulating economic change.

A third concern of "new evangelicals" is critique of government when it is unjust. This is the church's "prophetic role" - not to be government but to "speak truth to power."

Last month, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) called on its members - some 45,000 churches - to protest Republican cuts in programs for the needy:

"Approximately 1 percent of the federal budget is devoted to helping the poorest people around the world ... In 2011, our international assistance budget was cut by 11 percent. For 2012, the House of Representatives has recommended a further 30 percent reduction ... this is the wrong place to cut."

One question I tried to answer in my work was: why a shift away from the religious right now? One reason is generational, with idealistic younger evangelicals rejecting the politics of their parents. Another is that, since the 1960s, views about sex, the environment and global connectedness have shifted nationwide, including among evangelicals.

In their self-critique entitled Unchristian , evangelicals David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons title their chapters Hypocritical, Sheltered, Too Political, Judgmental and Antihomosexual. Ouch.

Still another reason for the present shift is ethical concerns amid a group that takes ethics seriously. The cavalier militarism and torture of the Bush years, as well as the consumerism and in-group-ism of the last thirty years, prodded many evangelicals to self re-examination. Ironically, Bush may have shattered the Christian coalition that elected him.

But with this bit of context, let me now turn to "new evangelical" views on abortion and gay unions.

Abortion: "Adopting Some Babies and Caring for Some Mothers"

Overwhelmingly, "new evangelicals" oppose abortion on religious and ethical grounds. Indeed, the idealism of young evangelicals, which leads them to work in poverty relief and environmental protection, leads them also to strong opposition against abortion. 73% of evangelicals under the age of thirty believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases; while 71% of older evangelicals do.

Yet "new evangelicals" have changed the way they approach the issue, away from the sort of activism that garnered so much publicity from the 1980s to George W. Bush's first term. This activism - from harassing women at family-planning clinics to threatening or killing doctors who perform abortion - is seen as contravening the most basic of Jesus' teachings and ethics.

Instead, "new evangelicals" hold that the Christlike relationship to pregnant women is one of service, requiring that evangelicals provide financial, medical, and emotional support for pregnant women pre- and postpartum.

On this view, if one wishes to reduce abortion, one must remove the central financial and emotional reasons to abort.

Many "new evangelicals" also believe that a consistent pro-life ethics demands what Joseph Cardinal Bernardin called "the seamless garment of life." If one is pro-life, one must care for the poor, champion human rights, and oppose not only abortion but also capital punishment.

Among the few evangelicals who feel that legal abortion at least prevents the grim realities of back-alley operations are Jim Wallis, Leah Daughtry (the Pentecostal minister who ran the 2008 Democratic nominating convention) and Randall Balmer, professor of religion at Barnard University.

Balmer's aim is not to make abortion illegal but "to make it unthinkable" by providing significant support for pregnant women and children. He has also written critically of those evangelicals who, he believes, instrumentalized abortion for political gain.

Noting that the biblical passages most cited against abortion all have other glosses (Deuteronomy 30:19; Psalm 139:13-16; Luke 1:14-42), Balmer holds that squeezing anti-abortion interpretations out of them is a case of "selective literalism."

The Deuteronomic verse that encourages us to "choose life," for instance, has become an evangelical bumper sticker, but in its original context the passage means "choose the way of life, God's path." Why do those who say they read Scripture literally, Balmer asks, not devote their energies also to oppose divorce, which the Bible explicitly condemns?

In his historical review of evangelical activism, Balmer notes that the anti-abortion movement gained momentum not in spontaneous outrage against legalization in 1973 but nearly a decade later, in the 1980s. Its purpose, on his view, was to unite evangelicals as a political bloc and win votes for the Republican Party.

At the time of legalization, abortion had evangelical support. The official Southern Baptist position, expressed in its 1971 resolution, was to allow abortion under a wide range of conditions, including the emotional state of the pregnant woman:

"we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of the likelihood of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother."

Commenting on Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Baptist Press wrote, "Religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision." W.A. Criswell, pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, also had no complaint:

"I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."

Those who disagree with Balmer's analysis hold that evangelical opposition to abortion indeed began in the 1970s, as a religious and moral protest against legalization. The Hyde amendment, banning the use of federal funds for abortion, was passed in 1976 with considerable evangelical support.

Balmer does not disagree, but holds that opposition to abortion became a mass movement only in the next decade. On his account it was not abortion that politicized evangelicals in the 1970s but government's threat to withdraw tax exemption from religious schools (or any non-profit) that remained racially segregated.

Paul Weyrich, a key architect of evangelical politics in the 1970s and 1980s, confirmed, "What caused the [Religious Right] movement to surface was the federal government's moves against Christian schools. It was not the other things."

After the tax-exemption battle subsided, Weyrich recalls, evangelical leaders held a conference call to identify a new cause that would keep evangelicals united as a Republican bloc. Several possibilities were discussed, and abortion was selected. "And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the religious right."

Balmer confirms this account with evangelical leaders of the time, including Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and Tim LaHaye, author of the best-selling Left Behind series of evangelical, apocalyptic thrillers.

Balmer finds it inconsistent that abortion was chosen as the evangelical banner issue, given evangelical distrust of government meddling in private matters and given evangelical support for capital punishment. He asks why the Republican-Religious Right coalition didn't outlaw abortion when it had the majority in Congress between 1994 and 2006 and when it controlled both the Congress and the presidency from 2000 to 2006:

"Could it be that they are less interested in actually reducing the incidence of abortion ... than they are in continuing to use abortion as a very potent political weapon, one guaranteed to mobilize their political base and get out the vote?"

Most evangelicals, however, share neither Balmer's support for legal abortion nor his historical-political critique. They spend their resources instead on developing service programs for women in crisis pregnancies. "New evangelicals" like Greg Boyd and Shane Claiborne focus on individual, voluntary action, following their overall extra-state stance. So, for instance, Boyd writes:

"The distinctly kingdom question is not, How should we vote? The distinctly kingdom question is, How should we live? ... How can we who are worse sinners than any woman with an unwanted pregnancy - and thus have no right to stand over them in judgment - sacrifice our time, energy, and resources to ascribe unsurpassable worth to them and their unborn children?"

Boyd and Claiborne tell parallel stories. Boyd describes a middle-aged woman in his parish who, on learning that a teenager in the neighbourhood was pregnant, took the girl into her home when her angry parents threw her out, and gave the girl financial and emotional support so that she could finish school.

Claiborne tells of his friend Brooke, who not only helps out a young woman who first became a mother when she was a teenager but also has two of the woman's four children living with her. Claiborne writes:

"I just have a more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers."

Joel Hunter and many "new evangelicals" who are active in politics and work with government have much the same ethics. "I am decidedly pro-life," Hunter writes. "But by working together instead of arguing, both sides [those for and against legal abortion] can get what they want."

Beginning from the obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves, Hunter opposes both abortion and capital punishment. Yet he works on abortion reduction with Democrats and progressives - as does the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good - and he helped write abortion reduction into the 2008 Democratic Party platform.

Hunter supported Obama's legislation to help pregnant girls finish their education and to help poor women obtain contraception, pre- and postnatal medical care and financial support.

Representing many in this cluster, the NAE's For the Health of the Nation holds to similar ethics:

"We believe that abortion, euthanasia, and unethical human experimentation violate the God-given dignity of human beings ... A threat to the aged, to the very young, to the unborn, to those with disabilities, or to those with genetic diseases is a threat to all."

But it spends more of its energies advocating restrictions on abortion. In 2009 the NAE asked Congress to continue prohibitions against using public funds for abortions.

Most NAE members also oppose using government grants to support stem cell research and facilities offering abortion in developing nations. Obama reversed George W. Bush's policies and allowed government funds to go to both, raising tensions between himself and "new evangelicals."

Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis, of the Evangelical Left, characteristically call for both governmental and private efforts to reduce abortion. Both support contraceptive use, as does the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, with Campolo noting that if government health plans for the poor included contraceptives, 500,000 abortions could be prevented each year. As Campolo writes:

"We should be consistently pro-life, which means that life is sacred and should be protected not only for the unborn but also for the born. This requires commitments to stop wars, end capital punishment and provide universal healthcare for all our citizens - in addition to stopping abortions."

Wallis echoes this sentiment: "It will be a great day when both poverty reduction and abortion reduction become non-partisan issues and bipartisan causes." Wallis, like Balmer, is one of the few evangelicals who would retain legal abortion. He also makes a point of discussing male sexual responsibility, which "is essential to finding solutions to the abortion dilemma and should be a primary message that men are speaking to other men."

In sum, by 2008, a consensus appears to have developed among "new evangelicals" that opposition to abortion is essential but coherent and Christlike when enmeshed in "seamless garment of life" advocacy on behalf of poor families and against other forms of killing such as capital punishment.

The differences between Boyd and Claiborne on one hand and Hunter, the NAE, and the Evangelical Left on the other hand concern the degree of engagement with government, with greater engagement being the course that the latter three generally pursue.

Gay Unions: Other People's Sins

On one hand, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons devote a chapter of their book Unchristian to what they see as un-Christlike homophobia among evangelicals.

Moreover, Billy Graham, father of post-war evangelicalism, stated that homosexuality "is wrong, it's a sin. But there are other sins. Why do we jump on that sin as though it's the greatest sin? The greatest sin in the Bible is idolatry."

On the other hand, Richard Cizik was asked to resign his position as vice president for governmental affairs at the NAE when, in a December 2008 National Public Radio interview, he noted his "shifting feelings" about gay civil unions:

"I'm shifting I have to admit. In other words I would willingly say I believe in civil unions. I don't officially support redefining marriage from its traditional definition, I don't think."

Cizik further noted that 40% of young evangelicals have a gay friend or family member, and that over 50% favour same-sex civil unions or marriages. Moreover, only 29% of evangelicals under thirty hold that the "homosexual lifestyle" is a "major" problem.

But Cizik's problems came from the 58% of elderly evangelicals and 46% of baby boomers who do think homosexuality is a serious problem. 80% of theological conservatives report strong discomfort with homosexuality; 40% of evangelicals say schools should have the right to fire gay teachers, and some are wary of donating to HIV/AIDS relief agencies.

One approach that is gaining ground among "new evangelicals" is the distinction between homosexuality as sin and homosexuality as a crime or condition for diminished rights. "We should calm down," Joel Hunter says, "and think about what the religious issue is and what the legal issue is."

With this church-state distinction, one may hold that homosexuality is a sin but that the neutral state may not criminalize it, as the neutral state may not enforce religious belief. The state does not, for instance, take away civil rights because people commit other sins, such as adultery or greed.

Evangelicals who hold this view believe that heterosexual marriage is God's way, but they oppose discrimination against gay people in all civil rights arenas (housing, education and employment outside of church agencies), and they strive to "walk with" gay people and serve them, as they walk with all people.

Another approach gaining ground concerns the state's role in marriage more broadly. Campolo and others suggest that government should grant only civil unions to hetero- and homosexual couples, as that is the state's legitimate purview.

Such unions would grant rights and responsibilities that promote the common good (such as parental responsibility for child support). Indeed, divorce is already civil, and religious divorce procedures have no bearing on legal status or rights.

On this view, faith traditions may have many regulations regarding marriage: Catholics may not marry those who have been divorced, for instance, while Protestants and Jews can. But the neutral state should not enforce religious views of marriage - not religious views of gay marriage anymore than religious views of heterosexual marriage.

The religious institution of marriage should be left to the churches, with each congregation deciding whether to bless gay ones. So, in my interview with him, David Gushee argued:

"The bonding of state and church in the recognition of marriages is a vestige of an earlier day ... I don't support gay marriage partly because of hesitations about furthering a system that is incoherent, but we need some sort of legal recognition for heterosexual and homosexual long-term co-habitation and domestic partnerships as well [because] it is not good for society to have relationships in legal limbo. When the state is not levelling the playing field and providing procedural justice, then the most powerful interests prevail."

Randall Balmer has noted that the debate surrounding gay unions has certain parallels with his historical research on abortion. He finds that gay unions were instrumentalised by religious right leaders during and after the 1990s, much as abortion was instrumentalized a decade earlier. After the demise of the Soviet Union, he writes:

"The religious right desperately searched for a new enemy ... I won't dispute that the leaders of the religious right were acting, at some level, out of conviction, but they, along with leaders of the Republican Party, sensed a political opportunity as well."

Balmer finds this opportunism odious, as he finds judging the sins of others, including homosexuals. He is concerned to establish legal rights for gays:

"Is the denial of equal rights to anyone - women or Muslims or immigrants or gays consistent with the example of the man who healed lepers and paralytics and who spent much of his time with the cultural outcasts of his day?"

Both Balmer and Greg Boyd ask whether homosexuality is a frontburner issue among evangelicals because they think it is one sin from which they are free. (Kinnaman and Lyons note that a third of gays and lesbians regularly attend church and nearly 17% are evangelical.) Evangelicals, Boyd writes, think we

"may be divorced and remarried several times. We may be as greedy and as unconcerned about the poor and as gluttonous as others in our culture; we may be as prone to gossip and slander and as blindly prejudiced as others ... These sins are among the most frequently mentioned sins in the Bible. But at least we're not gay!"

Boyd's approach, characteristically, focuses on private, voluntary initiative. "What if, instead of trying to legally make life more difficult for gays, we worried only about how we could affirm their unsurpassable worth in service to them?" Boyd's idea is not

"that the church should publicly take a stand for gay marriage ... but that in our role as public representatives of the kingdom of God, Christians should stick to replicating Calvary toward gay people (as toward all people), and trust that their loving service will do more to transform people than laws ever could."

Joel Hunter, like many evangelicals who are active in political advocacy and work with government, does not propose legal status for gay unions. He defines the "ideal marriage" as between a man and a woman. But "I just don't put a lot of energy into this issue. With 25,000 kids dying of starvation each day, this is not an issue I'm going to spend time on."

Making a similar point about evangelical priorities, Tony Evans, founder of the Urban Alternative, notes, "If the church would have treated racism like it did the sins of adultery, homosexuality, and abortion, racism would have been addressed a long time ago."

Hunter believes much of the focus on gays is based on the fear that a gay-tolerant climate will prevent Christians from preaching their religious beliefs.

"People fear that, if you say from the pulpit that homosexuality is a sin, you'll go to jail, and the state will take away the church's tax exempt status. It's all hysteria ... The prophets - maybe I should say 'profits' - of polarization promote these views to increase their audience and income from that kind of misinformation. There's a market for fear."

The NAE characteristically comes down in the evangelical centre. On one hand, it supports neither gay marriage nor civil unions: "We also oppose innovations such as same-sex 'marriage.'" On the other, the NAE does not support discrimination: "homosexuals as individuals are entitled to civil rights, including equal protection of the law"; yet, "the NAE opposes legislation which would extend special consideration to such individuals based on their 'sexual orientation'."

Carl Esbeck, NAE's legal counsel, gives an example of how this balance might work out: "We would not support a law that forbade including the names of gay and lesbian soldiers on the Vietnam War memorial. That's capricious and violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution."

In the emergent churches, Shane Claiborne, following his countercultural approach, writes:

"My studies taught me that the higher a person's frequency of church attendance, the more likely they are to be sexist, racist, anti-gay, pro-military, and committed to their local church ... We need to call out the terrible theology that 'God hates fags'. The starting point is that we love gay people and God loves gay people."

But Claiborne is aware of the range of views on the issue, and he finds that even evangelicals who support gay marriage do not feel that "anything goes" in sex.

When holding public discussions, his Simple Way community presents four perspectives, "four people talking about how they worked out their salvation and how they think God feels about the way they live." The audience thus gets a sense of the range of evangelical views. His community's position on gay civil unions reflects its overall spunky style:

"If you think it's a sin to be gay, you can live here as long as you love gay people. And if you think it's a sin to say that, you can live here as long as you love the person who said that."

Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis and Ron Sider - on the evangelical left - seek to separate the religious from the legal issues - the question of sin on one hand and, on the other, the matter of diminished rights.

Wallis supports gay civil unions and equal legal protection for homosexuals (in housing, employment, and so on). Campolo notes that the United States government grants 1,138 rights to heterosexual but not to homosexual couples, and finds no justification for this in Jesus' teachings.

With some irony, he points out the fallacy in the claim that gay marriages would undermine heterosexual ones. "Heterosexuals are the ones getting divorces - gays want to get married!" Thus, gay marriage "may do just the opposite, strengthening traditional marriages."

Returning to Jesus' teachings as a guide, Campolo writes:

"Justice for gays and lesbians should be on the political front burner ... because it is impossible to tell people we love them if we deny them the basic rights we enjoy. And loving people - all people - is clearly preached in the red letters of the Bible."

Marcia Pally's latest book is The New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good, from which portions of this article have been extracted. She teaches Multilingual Multicultural Studies at New York University.