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Official chides Christian right
Moral Majority called aberration

...A top official of the National Association of Evangelicals told reporters gathered at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that the Moral Majority, a 1980s political movement dominated by Christian conservatives, was ''an aberration and a regrettable one at that," even though it drew evangelicals into the political process, because the organization was ''fatally flawed by a hubris that made the movement condescending and more than a bit judgmental."

''The Moral Majority lacked a servant heart of Christ born out of humility and compassion for a fallen humanity," said the official, Robert Wenz, who is vice president of national ministries for the National Association of Evangelicals....

...Wenz acknowledged a rift between black and white evangelicals, which he attributed to the failure of white evangelicals to support the civil rights movement that began in the late 1950s. As a result, he said, black evangelicals formed their own organization, the National Black Evangelical Association, and many black religious leaders avoid the word evangelical.

''The total lack of evangelicals in the civil rights movement continues to be an embarrassing failure from which we have not fully recovered," Wenz said.

''The lack of involvement in the civil rights movement meant that evangelicals surrendered that role to mainline churches. We should have been in Birmingham, but we were not."