A Faith for All Changes?

I came across this article ("Some young religious voters focus on social justice") on Yahoo News today. On one hand, I'm thrilled that the younger generation of religious voters are no longer blindly voting conservative and Republican. It's a move that illustrates how mature and savvy young voters are increasingly becoming, and an auspicious sign that my generation - far from being entitled slackers, as some naysayers have dubbed us - is in fact an intellectually and socially curious bunch. To quote someone else, "The revolution is here, the revolution is within us."

However, some quotes from the article do discomfort me [italics mine]:

Wallis, an evangelical Christian who also runs Sojourners, a social justice community, said these young adults "want their faith to make a difference. They're asking the question of vocation more than of career."

This resonates with Underwood, who hopes to use his divinity school studies and political involvement as a vehicle for social change.

"The one thing that I do think that I'm called to do is to help bridge the gap between the moral voices coming from the church and the moral decisions being made by those running the government," Underwood said.

Is anybody else worried by this quote? The article is about liberal religious voters, but that could have been said by ANY religious voter - including those who were raised to adopt a conservative, family-and-faith-based world view from their churches. Thus, the drive of religious Americans to see their values more fully embodied in U.S. civil life constitutes a double-edged sword for secularists like me.

In an ideal world, the above quote would not bother me because religious voters would realize that their religion is just one stream that feeds into their general understanding of a just society. However, the more Christians I meet, the less I am convinced that they are so rational. I can only hope that there are enough of us secularists voting next November to balance out the word of God with equally important perspectives such as personal experience, social history, and pragmatic economics.