New Evangelical Manifesto -part the last

The final chapters of the book cover things like ending the death penalty and making peace. At one level, there's nothing new here, but some main important arguments are collected together. I found myself wondering who the target audience would be for this book. I suspect that died-in-the-wool hard-line rightists would simply not engage: the mere fact that the positions here challenged their own would damn them. However, it would give pause for thought to those who had a somewhat open curiosity as to how biblical Christians might come to different positions from their own. I think, too, that it would help consolidate those who are changing their mind or have recently become dissatisfied about the political interpretations of the faith put out by the right. I hope it might also help those who hold back from Christian faith because they can see how unlovely the rightist interpretations are -these last ones already sense a dissonance between Christ and Christians, they just lack the background to be able to articulate a position based on where (I think) the Spirit has already led them in their hearts.

To me this is the one thing lacking: a missional (pneumatological) perspective. Could it be that the rejection of the rightist positions is in fact a move of the Spirit: the difficulty being that human argumentative passion has fastened many into political/social perspectives that are at odds with the Spirit of Christ? Articulating socially-compassionate and evidence-based perspectives, then, becomes a proto-evangelium linking the Spirit's work in arousing people to justice and mercy with the gospel and the communities of Christ following.

It would be interesting to take hold of the insights articulated in the Making Peace chapter and apply them to doing so with the Evangelical Right ... wouldn't that be 'fun'?