I'm Krista Tippett.

The Reverend Richard Seizek is Vice President in Washington for the National Association

of Evangelicals, an umbrella group for 25% of American voters.

Seizek has worked to expand the movement's focus to address climate change and torture

as moral issues alongside abortion and gay marriage.

Some conservative evangelicals recently tried and failed to have him silenced.

This hour hear the priorities, passion, and forthrightness that have made Richard Seizek

a symbol of what many now call the evolution of American Evangelicalism.

The gospel has priority over our politics and at times that means to be biblically consistent

you have to be politically inconsistent and you can't simply become a wholly owned

subsidiary of the GOP.

You can't do that and be faithful.

This is speaking of fate, stay with us.

Look for Krista Tippett celebrated new book, a chronicle of religion in our time, speaking

of fate, the book, in bookstores now.

I'm Krista Tippett.

Richard Seizek is Evangelical Christianity's key advocate before Congress, the White House

and the Supreme Court.

In March of this year, conservative Christian leaders demanded that he be silenced or removed

from his post, charging that his concerns for poverty, climate change, and torture have

shifted attention away from moral issues like gay marriage and abortion.

But for Seizek, war and the environment are moral issues too, and his positions have

...