I think we can remember our past without valorizing parts of our past that we ought to see as wrong.

I think Confederate Battle Flag is a symbol that causes a great deal of division and reminds us of a really hurtful legacy and past... I think there are some Southerners, black and white, who feel as though the rest of the country looks down on the South as uneducated and backward. And for some people, that was a symbol of defiance against that.

I think we can remember our past without valorizing parts of our past that we ought to see as wrong.

Conservative evangelicals don't want government support for our faith, because we believe God created all consciences free and a state-coerced act of worship isn't acceptable to God. Moreover, we believe the gospel isn't in need of state endorsement or assistance. Wall Street may need government bailouts but the Damascus Road never does.

An 'almost gospel' doesn't raise a corpse.

The assumption that the larger culture agrees with Christians on values issues led to evangelicals' minimizing the theologically distinctive aspects of Christian witness. It also set up evangelicals to be disappointed when the culture did not turn out the way many expected it to turn out. So our response ought to be that we are always, in every culture, strangers in exile.

We have to be the people who stand up and say look, vigilance is good and prudence is good. But a kind of irrational fear that leads itself to demagogic rhetoric is something that we have to say no - no, we're not going to go there.