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A national evangelical Christian leader has written that his fellow believers should vote for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, because she will radically reduce the abortion rate. Hillary, in whose campaign abortion industry lobbyists play a conspicuous role, favors abortion-on-demand throughout pregnancy. Yet Tony Campolo believes a second Clinton presidency will halve the number of abortions nationwide. “Hillary Clinton is one of the few candidates on the political stage who has a plan for cutting the abortion rate in America by at least 50 percent,” Campolo, a sociology professor emeritus at Eastern University, wrote in a debate on Religion News...

Well, at least the Dallas Morning News was kinda nice to Liberty University. In the lede to its story on Ted Cruz in New Hampshire, the newspaper called it a "huge evangelical Christian college." Once upon a time, many mainstream media routinely slapped Liberty with the "F" word: "Fundamentalist." But the paper doesn't prove its claim that Cruz sounded less evangelical, more secular in his New Hampshire visit to sound more presidential. It therefore pushes a related stereotype: that Americans don’t particularly like evangelicals. DMN paints Cruz as a conservative's conservative as well as an evangelical's evangelical. It says the...

This is what he (Tony Campolo) has to say about Hillary Clinton and why Christians should vote for her: “Some of my Evangelical friends raise questions about her views on abortion. But Hillary Clinton is one of the few candidates on the political stage who has a plan for cutting the abortion rate in America by at least 50 percent. I know Hillary Clinton to be a committed Christian. As a teenager, Hillary’s religious beliefs were heavily impacted by hearing a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr. The youth pastor of her Methodist church mentored her through her teenage years...

This was ugly. On his MSNBC show this evening, Chris Matthews criticized Jeb Bush, who will be speaking at Liberty University, for "stooping" to "that evangelical crowd" Let's play some political madlibs and imagine that instead of "stooping to that evangelical crowd," Matthews had criticized a candidate who spoke at an Islamic center for "stooping to that Muslim crowd." Cue the cries of religious bigotry! View the video here.

The "moderate" Bush will contest the evangelical vote because next to big donors, they’re his most loyal base. Jeb Bush famously told us that to win the White House, a Republican presidential candidate had to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general, without violating your principles.” It was widely interpreted as evidence that if Bush ran, he’d do it as a more centrist, reasonable candidate who’d be, in his own words, “much more uplifting, much more positive,” and willing to stand up to fire-and-brimstone party hardliners. Now comes the news that Bush will give the commencement address...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz chose a conservative, evangelical Christian university as the setting for his announcement that he was running for president. This underscored his apparent strategic decision to focus relentlessly on the conservative, highly religious segment of his party, both in terms of attempting to become their candidate of preference, and also in terms of maximizing their turnout in the 2016 primary elections. The Republican Party in general has a disproportionate percentage of conservative and highly religious Americans in its ranks, so Cruz's strategy would appear to make numerical sense -- as it would for other conservative politicians, like...

According to a recent poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for the Human Rights Campaign, gay and lesbian people are now more popular than evangelical Christians.The survey of 1000 likely 2016 voters nationwide asked respondents about their feelings toward gay and lesbian people and evangelical Christians. Fifty-three percent said they had favorable feelings toward gays and lesbians (up 13 points from 2011) while only 42% felt the same way about evangelical Christians. When it came to unfavorable feelings, only 18% claimed to have them toward gays and lesbians while 28% feel that way about evangelical Christians.We’ve been told that the...

Politico reports on Ted Cruz’s plan to become a factional candidate: The Texas Republican senator’s strategic play for Christian conservatives comes into even sharper focus this weekend as he rolls out the first television ad of the 2016 race. Titled “Blessing,” the commercial is aimed directly at evangelical and social conservative voters in early voting states, timed for Easter weekend and slated to air during popular Christian-themed programming. It’s an exercise in narrowcasting that telegraphs exactly how Cruz intends to win the GOP nomination against better-funded and better-known rivals. Cruz is well-suited to being this kind of candidate, but typically...

Here's "Blessing," Sen. Ted Cruz's first campaign video as an official candidate for the GOP presidential nomination:(VIDEO-AT-LINK)And here's Sen. Rand Paul's first entry into the same category. Paul will announce his run for the White House tomorrow:(VIDEO-AT-LINK)The differences go far beyond the formats imposed by a 30-second TV spot and a longer online video—and they're indicative, I assume, of different emphases by the candidate. Where Cruz, who announced his bid at Liberty University, the world's largest religious college, is clearly driving hard toward evangelicals, Paul is stressing a larger, more-inclusive vision of the GOP. He talks about being "a different...

Here it is, the first television ad of the 2016 presidential campaign, courtesy of the first official presidential candidate, Ted Cruz. No beating around the bush here—we get a mention of Jesus in the very first sentence:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) "Were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ, I would have been raised by a single mom without my father in the house. God's blessing has been on America from the very beginning of this nation. Over and over again when we faced impossible odds, the American people rose to the challenge. This is our fight, and that is why I'm...

Corporate leaders and chambers of commerce are at war with those evangelical Christians who have decided to reassert themselves in the Republican political process. This war is eerily reminiscent of an earlier time when there was friction between the business wing of the GOP and Christian activists. Make no mistake -- the rise of variations of "religious freedom" bills in GOP-dominated legislatures around the nation is no coincidence. They are supported and backed by skilled political pros and religious leaders who are tired of being left out of the American political process. They are especially weary of being treated as...

In news that must have shocked the vast majority of New York Times subscribers, columnist Nicholas Kristof this week divulged that he has seen evangelical Christians doing selfless, crucial service in the world’s most dangerous places among the most desperately poor, even though liberals know evangelicals are religious bumpkins. Today, among urban Americans and Europeans, “evangelical Christian” is sometimes a synonym for “rube.” In liberal circles, evangelicals constitute one of the few groups that it’s safe to mock openly.Yet the liberal caricature of evangelicals is incomplete and unfair. I have little in common, politically or theologically, with evangelicals or,...

As Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex) announced last week that he was running for president, his Virginia audience cheered. He dropped applause line after applause line on some 10,000 students at Liberty University, which bills itself as the largest Christian university in the world. Cruz riffed, unimaginatively, on an “imagine” theme, asking the young audience to “imagine a president” who would repeal Obamacare and perform other feats. There was applause throughout. But one line prompted the students to erupt into a roaring, 30-second, standing ovation: “Instead of a president who boycotts Prime Minister Netanyahu, imagine a president who stands unapologetically with...

When Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election last Monday, he became the first to do so officially. Here is a look at what he will need to do if he hopes to win. The coalition To win the Republican nomination, Cruz will have to bring together the party’s anti-establishment wing, which is made of separate but overlapping voter blocs, including Christian conservatives, libertarians and Tea Party voters angry with the leadership of both parties. His ultimate goal is to get into a one-on-one campaign against whoever emerges as the favorite of establishment Republicans....

The left lost its collective grip last Monday, when Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced he was running for president. Really, it was the mirror image of the visceral way Republicans react to Hillary Clinton. It’s no overstatement to say that Cruz is absolutely hated by the left, loathed as the embodiment of right-wing insanity. Which, of course, makes conservatives love him even more. Following Cruz’s announcement, lefties comforted themselves by reassuring everyone within earshot that Cruz has no chance of winning. “It will never happen,” was the title of a post on the Talking Points Memo blog by...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd discussed how Ted Cruz could have a shot at the nomination by riding the evangelical vote to victory in a YouTube video released Friday. Todd pointed out that in the past candidates can get “relevancy” from the evangelical vote, but no one has been able to use it to win the nomination. But that Cruz, if he can clinch the evangelical vote, might be able to change that because “this primary calendar, believe it or not, is actually in the advantage of evangelical candidates.” Todd stated that two of the first four primary...

On a sunny Saturday morning in early March, Bob Vander Plaats walked into the West Des Moines Marriott with a chip on his shoulder. Iowa's evangelical shot-caller had come to meet with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was in town for the Iowa Ag Summit, a cattle call that drew the majority of Republican presidential hopefuls. Over the course of the weekend, Vander Plaats had sit-downs scheduled with just about all of them. But not Jeb Bush. A twice-failed gubernatorial candidate who helped boost Mike Huckabee to victory in the 2008 caucuses, Vander Plaats has grown accustomed to presidential aspirants...

Forget New Hampshire, or Iowa, or Lynchburg, Virgina, where Republican Senator Ted Cruz kicked off his presidential campaign. State Senator Ruben Diaz wants Mr. Cruz to come stump in the South Bronx. “Imagine Ted Cruz traveling to the Bronx where there is a grassroots army of Black and Hispanic Evangelical Christians who are just like him—and who have been ignored by every Presidential candidate,” Mr. Diaz wrote today in one of his periodic e-mail blasts to constituents. “Imagine Ted Cruz coming to the South Bronx where there are many of Hispanic Evangelical Churches that are willing to stand together for...

Someone had to be the first to jump into the 2016 presidential race, and it seems only fitting that that someone was US Senator Ted Cruz, leapfrogging over his likely opponents to launch his campaign early with a Jesus-soaked speech at the world's largest fundamentalist college. Cruz is a long shot for the GOP nomination, partly because he lacks experience, and mostly because no one likes him. But tucked into his speech Monday, in between stories about sin and redemption and abolishing the IRS, Cruz offered one reason he actually thinks he can win. "Today, roughly half of born again...

Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential run is premised on the idea that, by speaking to the “values” of evangelical voters, he can mobilize them in numbers not seen in a very long time. “Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values,” Cruz said yesterday, adding that these voters had been “staying home.” Cruz’s decision to announce his run at Liberty University is itself a sign that he hopes to assume the mantle of leading evangelical champion. And as Jon Ward puts it, Cruz’s announcement was “an attempt to lay down...