Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo is trying to pry open a political identity that’s been treated as welded shut. In one move, he rejects the lazy shorthand that “evangelical” means “Republican” and reframes evangelicalism as a moral tradition broad enough to embarrass both parties. The key phrase is “rally evangelicals”: he’s speaking in the language of campaigns, not sermons, because he understands how thoroughly faith has been processed through partisan machinery. He’s not asking Democrats to pander; he’s telling them they’ve ignored a ready-made theological vocabulary that could compete with abortion and culture-war cues.

The subtext is a rebuke aimed in two directions. To Democrats: stop treating religious voters as a hostile planet. There are entry points grounded in scripture, not in latte liberalism, and creation care is one of them. To evangelicals: your Bible isn’t a single-issue instrument; it contains obligations that don’t map neatly onto the Right’s donor-class priorities. “Environmentally responsible” is deliberately modest wording, a bridge phrase meant to translate “stewardship of creation” into civic policy without triggering reflexive suspicion of “climate activism.”

Context matters: late-20th-century American evangelicalism was increasingly fused with Republican politics, leaving dissenting evangelicals sounding like traitors in their own churches. Campolo, a prominent progressive-leaning evangelical, offers a strategic and theological alternative: make environmental responsibility a test of public morality. The cleverness is that he’s not importing politics into religion; he’s reminding everyone that politics already moved in, and it picked a side.