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Chris La Tondresse, founder of RecoveringEvangelical.com, appeared on Fox News December 29 to promote talking points initiated during the Obama campaign that Evangelical concerns should reach beyond abortion and gay marriage.
La Tondresse’s rationale…

There’s over 2,000 verses in the Bible that deal with God’s care and concern for the poor. There are less than 2 dozen on homosexuality and even fewer that address abortion. Now you certainly wouldn’t get that impression from looking at the political agenda of the far right. Now for my generation, if we have to choose between those 2,000 verses that deal with poverty or those 2 dozen, it’s a no brainer.

La Tondresse states on his website he is “Special Assistant to Jim Wallis,” an Evangelical Obama supporter.
On Fox, La Tondresse stated he is part of a “whole generation of evangelicals… applying their faith… to a broader and deeper agenda than ever before. It includes things like poverty, HIV/AIDs, genocide, human trafficking, the war in Iraq, global climate change….”
La Tondresse further stated the Republican Party will continue to lose young Evangelical voters by focusing on abortion and gay marriage:

La Tondresse: There are 3,000 abortions in America every single day, and that is a number that’s unfit for any caring society. But there are 30,000 kids that died yesterday, will die today, and will die tomorrow from hunger, lack of clean drinking water, and preventable diseases. And my generation continues to be pro-life, but for us that definition has to be broader than ever before. It has to include those 30,000 kids in order to be taken seriously.
Interviewer: When you say 30,000 kids, you mean around the world, not just this country.
La Tondresse: Absolutely. It’s global and it’s proportional.

I find three false premises with La Tondresse’s logic:
1. … that “political Evangelicals on the far right,” as La Tondresse calls us, are not concerned with issues aside from abortion and gay marriage. We are both personally (missions) and politically involved in those human life struggles. It is the older generation of Evangelicals who give the bulk of the money in church/taxes to fight these evils.
2. … that La Tondresse’s generation has to choose between caring about abortion vs. the others.
3. … that if numbers constitute proportional need, La Tondresse compared the wrong statistics. La Tondresse compared U.S. abortion stats against worldwide death-by-poverty stats. In fact, there are 115,000 abortions daily worldwide, according to Guttmacher (42 million divided by 365), so almost 4x as many children die from abortion worldwide daily than all other poverty-related reasons combined.
[HT: moderator Carder]

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