Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo is doing something evangelicals are trained to do in church but rarely encouraged to do in politics: name the power structure out loud. He frames the “real problem” not as a shortage of Democratic-friendly Bible verses, but as an infrastructure problem. If the political right controls the religious media, then it controls the soundtrack of faith: which issues get treated as “biblical,” which candidates get branded as “godly,” which anxieties get baptized as virtues.

The line is also a quiet rebuke to his own camp. “Those of us who are evangelicals and Democrats” signals a minority identity inside an already identity-heavy subculture. The subtext: you can’t just argue your way into legitimacy with better theology if the channels that define evangelical common sense are gated by partisan incentives. Campolo isn’t describing an ideological debate so much as a distribution monopoly. In media terms, it’s less about content than reach, repetition, and the authority that comes from being the default voice.

Context matters: late 20th-century evangelicalism in the U.S. became tightly interwoven with conservative politics through radio, TV ministries, and later cable and talk networks. Those platforms didn’t merely reflect a movement; they organized it, turning moral vocabulary into partisan shorthand. Campolo, a prominent progressive evangelical, is warning that when “religious media” is fused to the right, dissenting believers get cast as suspect, even when they share the same faith commitments.

It works because it shifts blame from personal piety to systems, from “why don’t evangelicals vote our way?” to “who gets to narrate evangelical reality?” That’s an accusation, and a strategic diagnosis, in one sentence.