Time & Perspective Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo isn’t naming “hot issues” so much as diagnosing a political technology: find the switches, wire them to identity, then keep jabbing until the lights stay on. As an evangelical insider, his authority comes from proximity. He’s not an outside critic sneering at believers; he’s a clergyman warning that the community’s moral imagination is being narrowed into a two-item menu. The phrase “defining issues” is the tell. It concedes that, in practice, many evangelicals aren’t being defined by the Sermon on the Mount or the demands of neighbor-love, but by a pair of culture-war litmus tests that can be reliably converted into votes, donations, and tribal cohesion.

“Hot buttons will be pushed” is deliberately mechanical. It strips away the language of conscience and replaces it with reflex: stimulus, reaction, repeat. The subtext is less about the intrinsic moral stakes of sexuality and abortion and more about how those stakes get instrumentalized. Campolo implies a kind of captivity to perpetual outrage, where the community’s energy is harvested by operatives who know that fear and disgust travel faster than nuance. His “time and time again” lands like fatigue, not triumph: a prediction of repetition, not resolution.

Context matters: by the late 20th century into the 2000s, abortion and LGBTQ rights had become the central organizing symbols of the Religious Right, often eclipsing poverty, racism, war, and economic justice. Campolo’s intent is corrective and pastoral. He’s trying to reopen the theological aperture, reminding evangelicals that a faith reduced to two flashpoints is easy to mobilize and hard to sanctify.