The last year has been a difficult time for people who identify as evangelical Christians. And the last few months have been especially tough for them.

Their support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election was, in many ways, an abandonment of their moral center, given his several marriages and affairs, his admitted sexual assault, his religious ignorance, his business dealings in support of gambling, his refusal to release his tax returns and thus be candid with the American people -- all of that and more has been almost impossible for his evangelical supporters to explain with a straight face.

And now the support many evangelicals are giving to the disgraced Senate candidate from Alabama, Roy Moore, has led many, including me, to suggest their actions amount to rank hypocrisy. In fact, most have done more than suggest. Accuse or declare is closer to the truth.

Now we learn that more than 300 hundred Christian theologians who attended the recent annual gathering of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature have issued a statement condemning what they describe as abuse of the faith by some evangelicals. Here is the Religion News Service report on the AAR/SBL gathering and how Trump (well, opposition to Trump) dominated the proceedings.

As this National Catholic Reporter account of the gathering said, "Alarm about Trump's presidency — and the anti-intellectual forces several scholars say he has empowered — pervaded the annual joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, which ended Nov. 21."

The statement issued by the theologians is called the Boston Declaration, and it's pretty pointed, though you can read it and draw your own conclusions.

Early on the declaration says this: ". . .we hear the cries of women and men speaking out about sexual abuse at the hands of leaders in power and we are outraged. We are outraged by the current trends in Evangelicalism and other expressions of Christianity driven by white supremacy, often enacted through white privilege and the normalizing of oppression. Confessing racism as the United States’ original and ongoing sin, we commit ourselves to following Jesus on the road of costly discipleship to seek shalom justice for the least, the lost, and the left out."

In the Christian tradition, such statements are examples of what's called a prophetic voice. In this case prophetic doesn't mean predicting the future but, rather, shining a light on what the issuers of such statements believe is wrong and in tension with core beliefs of the faith.

Having and using one's prophetic voice always has been an important part of both Judaism and Christianity, and the Boston Declaration, whether you agree or disagree with its contents, is a good example of what it means to view current events through the lens of a faith commitment and then respond to what one sees. Silence in the face of evangelical hypocrisy is not a useful option.

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HOW DOES THIS HELP?

A massacre at an Egyptian mosque on Friday has left more than 200 people dead. Can someone please explain how the perpetrators of such atrocities imagine that they are helping their cause through such means? I have never understood that thinking.