To help build support for that cause, a new group has organized called the Two Futures Project, which some see bringing together younger evangelicals in a new, distinctive way.
“Nuclear weapons are a direct affront to God’s dream of shalom for the world,” Rob Bell, the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church and a popular public speaker, said during a recent telephone news conference for the project. “Life is beautiful, and nuclear weapons are ugly.”
Bell, 38, said his generation is “keenly aware of how the world is smaller than it used to be. It used to be ‘There’s us here and there’s them over there, and we can do our thing and they can do their thing.’ But we all have become so much more aware of how we are all connected.”
Some of those participating in the news conference spoke of a “broadening” of the evangelical agenda, and a willingness particularly of under-40 evangelicals to build alliances across some traditional lines of theological division to mobilize on key issues.
“I’m grateful there are a lot of young evangelicals aligning themselves with this cause,” said Lynne Hybels, who, with her husband Bill, helped found Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago area. Hybels described herself as a mother and grandmother who came of age during the Cold War, and later “forgot about the bomb” when it seemed no longer an imminent threat.
But Hybels said she heard George Schultz, who served as secretary of state under former president Ronald Reagan, speak about a year ago on the threat nuclear weapons present, and “that very abruptly jolted me out of complacency.”
For evangelicals, “as Christians who believe in the profound value of life, we should be at the front of the line” in the push against nuclear weapons, she said. “I want to protect the unborn, I want to feed the poor” — so the campaign against nuclear weapons seems consistent with those core values.
One of the leaders of the Two Futures Project is Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, a 31-year-old Baptist minister from Nashville.
In a post 9/11 world, the nuclear weapons some have seen as “our ultimate ace-in-the-hole now have become the greatest threat to us all,” Wigg-Stevenson said. The project is gaining support “from across the theological and political spectrum” — buoyed by President Barack Obama’s remarks in a speech in Prague on Palm Sunday calling for complete elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth, and declaring that “moral leadership is more powerful than any weapons.”
By and large, young Christians are not focused on the hot-button issues such as abortion and gay rights, said Shane Claiborne, an author and co-founder of the Potter Street Community. They want to know how faith connects with the world. They ask questions, like the one he had just seen on a college student’s t-shirt, such as “WWJB” — “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”
