Politics & Power Quote by Tony Campolo

Campolo’s line is a rebuke disguised as a reminder: if “evangelical” automatically conjures white Republicans in your head, you’ve already swallowed a political branding campaign. His intent is corrective, aimed at journalists, operatives, and church leaders who treat evangelicalism as a monolith. By foregrounding Black evangelicals, he forces a category crisis: the same “thoroughly evangelical, thoroughly biblical” posture that gets coded as conservative in white America shows up, in Black America, alongside a durable Democratic voting pattern.

The subtext is sharper than the statistics. Campolo is poking at a long-running rhetorical trick in U.S. culture wars, where “biblical” is used as a synonym for a narrow set of policy preferences. If people who are as scripture-centered as any white evangelical still vote Democratic, then the claim that the Bible naturally yields Republican politics starts looking less like theology and more like tribal identity management.

Context matters: Campolo emerged as a prominent evangelical voice trying to pull the movement away from its late-20th-century fusion with the GOP. His framing also nods to a real historical divergence. Black churches have often been the most disciplined carriers of evangelical piety in America, but their political memory is shaped by segregation, voting rights battles, and economic inequality, not suburban backlash politics. The line quietly challenges white evangelicals: if you’re confident your politics are “biblical,” why does another “thoroughly biblical” community land elsewhere? Campolo’s provocation is that “evangelical” names a faith, but in practice it’s been marketed as an ethnicity.