The chairmen of Evangelicals & Catholics Together (ECT), Timothy George and Thomas Guarino, have an article up at First Things about the on-going project that was initiated by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Chick Colson. I quibble a bit with their historical rendering: ECT did not simply start as an effort to adjudicate relations between the churches in their respective missionary efforts in Latin America. It was the Moral Majority, begun in 1979, that first brought large numbers of evangelicals and Catholics together for the common aim of electing Republicans.
It is clear that the current leaders of ECT, like their predecessors, are quite willing to reduce religion to ethics and ethics to politics. They conclude with the affirmation that, whatever their differences, they are committed to the issue of religious liberty and will never render to Caesar the things that are God's. Of course, all of Creation belongs to God, so I am not sure which part they are bracketing off, but this has been ECT's MO, and the Moral Majority's before ECT, to run around for theological justifications for political positions already arrived at. It is as unseemly now as it was then.
And, by the way, the efforts to bring Protestantism to Latin America is a project Catholics should resist. I know I will not get any points from the ecumenism police, but introducing Calvinistic ideas, and the American Way, into a Catholic culture is cruel, not noble.
