a challenge to my fellow evangelicals

Many well-intentioned evangelicals have been drawn to the Republican Party platform with the hope of making an impact on culture and voting their values. But instead of actually helping fill in “the hole in our gospel,” as Richard Stearns describes in his book of the same title, this focus has had the opposite effect, helping to create the imploding black hole of evangelical politics we are seeing now in the Republican party. As painful as this has been to watch, this may be the best thing that has happened to American evangelism in a long time.

For the first time in my life, I feel compelled to reject my community’s unquestioned political alignment with the G.O.P. and challenge my fellow evangelicals to reconsider.

Over the past 16 years, I have volunteered my time helping evangelical churches around the world. I began this work by leading religious freedom advocacy for evangelical churches in the hometown of George W. Bush, which gave me a unique opportunity to observe the importance of who sits in the Oval Office. I also saw how easy it is for American evangelicals to be a politicized subculture, a tendency I see as detrimental to authentically living out our faith, as Christ modeled for us to do.

From 2007 to 2016, I worked with the World Evangelical Alliance, where I represented 130 national alliances within a constituency of 600 million members. I traveled to many countries and saw how evangelicals engage politically all over the world. These observations come from that work:

1. Only in the United States is climate change a controversial and politicized issue. Evangelicals in 129 countries support their government’s efforts to face this challenge.

2. Evangelicals in other countries do not consider a national healthcare system as a controversial issue and, in fact, see it as highly desirable.

3. One of the highest priorities for a majority of evangelicals around the world is for their governments to combat poverty and hunger, improve public education and provide clean water for ALL citizens, even if this means paying more taxes.

4. Evangelicals from other countries want to see their government buy fewer weapons and invest in economic development and peace initiatives.

5. Globally, evangelicals disapprove of torture being used by their governments in any form.

6. A majority of evangelicals around the world view capital punishment as barbaric.

7. Our evangelical brothers and sisters cannot comprehend that American evangelicals are so overwhelmingly opposed to any gun control reform.

8. Nuclear disarmament and the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons is not even questioned among the vast majority of evangelicals in other countries.

9. Except for countries with high populations of Muslims, protecting vulnerable L.G.B.T. citizens and other social justice issues are not viewed as being part of a “liberal” agenda.

10. Whether abortion is legal or illegal, a majority of evangelicals in other countries have not prioritized this in their politics. Where abortion is illegal, evangelicals are more concerned about the high rate of maternal deaths that result from “bedroom abortions.”

11. Evangelicals in other countries working to help refugees and internally displaced people have questioned if Americans who support Mr. Trump are reading from a different Bible, because theirs is very clear that “welcoming the stranger” is a Judeo-Christian priority.

All of these stances are viewed as being pro-life and pro-family.

Our evangelical brothers and sisters around the world cannot understand how or why the majority of American evangelicals support Donald Trump. They have coined a new word, American ideo-evangelicals, to describe those in the U.S. who are voting more for their political ideology than for their faith values.

Evangelicals from all regions, but particularly in Africa, consider Hillary Clinton a “sister in Christ” and someone who lives out the Golden Rule in all the good she has done for women and children. Many affectionately call her “Sister Hillary.”

In the coming months and years, as this unprecedented election and its consequences filter down, my hope and prayer is that American evangelicals will become less ideo-evangelical and more like our global brother and sister evangelicals, who I believe live out a more holistic gospel faith in the political sphere.

It is also my hope that the Democratic Party will seize the opportunity to reach out, particularly to younger evangelicals who recognize the importance of healthy parameters for Church/State separation and are exploring where they can vote their values for a more pragmatic, holistic, less politicized gospel. We need to listen to them and help lead a path forward if we truly seek to live out our Gospel faith’s greatest command of loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

Deborah Fikes previously served as a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals and as the Executive Advisor to the World Evangelical Alliance. She holds a graduate degree in international law from Oxford University.