The current immigration debate that had been playing out in America and in the Evangelical community has exposed the lack of a rigorous approach to this contentious issue. When many Evangelicals take a stand on an issue and explain their basis, it is usually a bible verse or a claim from scripture. That may be right and good, but it's often divorced from an understanding of actual politics as they are practiced and the ways that politics have developed in the West, which has formed the basis for European and American politics as we know and practice it today.
If I could state it succinctly: I get the impression they want to say a lot about politics without having to know much about politics, either intellectually or historically. To add a further complicating factor: it's not clear how the theology that they present should be related to politics, both in term of theory and practice. For a group that usually offers profoundly biblical and well-thought positions on a host of pastoral, doctrinal, or cultural questions, their engagement with politics is woefully underdeveloped.
Michael Gerson outlined this problem in his critical piece in The Atlantic back in April. He chastises Evangelicals for lacking "a model or ideal of political engagement—an organizing theory of social action." In comparison to Catholics, who have a rather broad and deep tradition of political thought, Evangelicals make appeals to the "the Bible" which means they basically have no framework to keep them tethered when the political winds blow.
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