UNASHAMED OF THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST: ON PUBLIC POLICY AND PUBLIC SERVICE BY EVANGELICALS

The year is 2025, and the occasion, judicial confirmation hearings by the US Senate's Committee on the Judiciary. A newly elected president has just nominated an accomplished, mid-career law professor to serve as the next Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. Until recent days, this account of anti-religious acerbity by a US senator would have sounded like the fanciful tale of a political satirist rather than a bona fide journalistic report. But on Jun 7, 2017, fiction became fact. Only the minor details of the historic exchange differ from those of the hypothetical narrative. The real hearing occurred before the US Senate Committee on the Budget. US senators can and should do better than to ascribe disrespectfulness, discriminatory propensities, and hatred to nominees for public office merely because those nominees hold theological views that contravene the claims of other religious adherents or the sentiments of secular elites.