Redemption | Print Article | Newsweek.com

"As the Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals for nearly 30 years, Cizik should have known better. Even as polls continued to show a younger generation of Christians who were more accepting than their parents of homosexuality and gay marriage, the men who were running the old-school religious right remained completely and unequivocally opposed—and the NAE, an association of tens of thousands of churches, had always been positioned squarely within that flank. But for some time Cizik had been distancing himself from the old-timers, promoting global warming and environmentalism as Christian causes and supporting government-funded contraception as a way to reduce teen pregnancy. Religious-right stalwarts had long been calling out Cizik as insufficiently orthodox, but until now the NAE had his back."

He reiterates his support for civil unions this way: "Is it possible to deny due process and equal protection to those people whose personal lifestyle I disagree with?" And then, our meeting over, he goes off to see his new friends at the Open Society Institute, the group funded by George Soros—who is, as everybody knows, a billionaire and a liberal.