The Evangelical crack-up

I'm sure I'm the last one to come to commenting on the big "Evangelical Crack-Up" story David Kirkpatrick wrote in the Times magazine yesterday. I'm cross-posting this on "Crunchy Con" and "Casting Stones," Beliefnet's new political mash-up blog (have you visited it yet? You should. David Kuo's gotten tipsy on lime sherbet and 7-Up punch, and is throwing rhetorical roundhouses all the livelong day).

Anyway, the gist of the story is that the Religious Right is falling apart as a political force. Here's what journalists call the nut graf:

“There was a time when evangelical churches were becoming largely and almost exclusively the Republican Party at prayer,” said Marvin Olasky, the editor of the evangelical magazine World and an informal adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor. “To some extent — we have to see how much — the Republicans have blown it. That opportunity to lock up that constituency has vanished. The ball now really is in the Democrats’ court.”

The piece details how younger generations of Evangelicals and their pastors are not abandoning traditional positions on standard religious-right issues, as much as they're expanding their interests to take up environmental stewardship and serving the poor more directly as critical concerns. Some of the old guard find this a "capitulation" in the culture war, and turn up their noses at the yucky alliances the youngsters propose to make with liberals. But the younger Evos point out that the old guard has made some pretty yucky alliances itself for the sake of mobbing up with the Republican Party. Anyway, I don't think it's true at all that the GOP's loss is the Democratic Party's proportionate gain; the recent Pew survey found that a sizable chunk of Evangelicals have fallen away from the GOP, but haven't joined up with the Democrats. If the Democrats could bring themselves to be more open and welcoming to religious conservatives whose theological conservatism led them to be more embracing of traditionally Democratic positions on the economy, that could change.

That's pretty much what Jeff Sharlet fears. Sharlet, writing from the religious left, doesn't buy it, and thinks that this story is just another example of liberal media wishful thinking. He says that younger Evangelicals aren't getting more liberal, they're just expanding their idea of what politics is. Excerpt:

This is not to say that the two parties are identical, but rather that they don't represent the full left/right spectrum that the establishment media suggests -- and that evangelical and the conservative wing of the Democratic Party aren't such an unlikely match. Billy Graham, in his youth, was a Democrat -- as were most Southern evangelicals before the Civil Rights era. Some of them were fundamentalists and New Dealers to the extent that they welcomed government pork when it came their way. To suggest that evangelicals are reviving that Democratic tradition -- mildly populist economics combined with social conservatism and a fundamental belief in the export of American power -- doesn't so much herald a moderation as an expansion of cultural influence. And culture, as evangelical activists understand in a way that the NYT does not, is politics.

Though I think Jeff is playing something of the sore winner, he's on to something here. As readers of my book "Crunchy Cons" know, I make an argument there for a new conservatism based on traditionalist conservative principles (as opposed to libertarianism and "business conservatism"), which don't always line up with GOP orthodoxy -- and which sometimes cross over into the "liberal" bailiwick, at least according to the rigid template our media and political culture assign such things. It's telling that the Republican Party machers can embrace a man like Rudy Giuliani, who hits the nationalist, pro-business, strong-on-defense buttons, but who could hardly be more antithetical to traditional GOP positions on abortion and gay marriage -- but they keep a man like Mike Huckabee, who is a solid social conservative but somewhat to the left of the Club For Growth on economics, at arm's length as an unreliable exponent of conservatism. Doesn't that indicate where the GOP's treasure is -- in particular, the treasure of the Evangelical power brokers? As Huckabee says in the Kirkpatrick piece:

“They finally have the soldier they have been waiting for, and they shouldn’t send me out into the battlefield without supplies,” Huckabee told me in exasperation. He argued that the movement’s leaders would “become irrelevant” if they started putting political viability or low taxes ahead of their principles about abortion and marriage.

“In biblical terms, it is like the salt losing its flavor; it’s sand,” Huckabee said. “Some of them have spent too long in Washington. . . . I think they are going to have a hard time going out into the pews and saying tax policy is what Jesus is about, that he said, ‘Come unto me all you who are overtaxed and I will give you rest.’ ”

Huckabee's quote helped cast into a certain relief this passage:

Conservative Christian leaders in Washington acknowledge a “leftward drift” among evangelicals, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and the movement’s chief advocate in Washington. He told me he believed that Hybels and many of his admirers had, in effect, fallen away from orthodox evangelical theology. Perkins compared the phenomenon to the century-old division in American Protestantism between the liberal mainline and the orthodox evangelical churches. “It is almost like another split coming within the evangelicals,” he said.

Now, I'm not an Evangelical, but what does "orthodox evangelical theology" mean in this context? It seems to me that Perkins is trying to make a statement of political orthodoxy into a theological statement. What theological orthodoxies are Evangelicals disenchanted with the GOP violating? If they were becoming pro-choice, or pro-gay marriage, that'd be one thing. But in what sense is becoming more interested in environmental stewardship, or "social justice" (I hate that term) issues a matter of theological heterodoxy? Is the Republican Party the Evangelical Vatican?

There was another passage in the Kirkpatrick piece that stood out to me:

“There is this sense that the personal Gospel is what evangelicals believe and the social Gospel is what liberal Christians believe,” Carlson said, “and, you know, there is only one Gospel that has both social and personal dimensions to it.” He once felt lonely among evangelicals for taking that approach, he told me. “Now it is a growing phenomenon,” he said.

Good for Pastor Carlson, but let me offer one caveat. I'm sure the Democratic Party loves the idea that some Evangelicals are warming to it, and in the end, it's better for religious conservatives that they aren't known as the Republican Party at prayer. Nevertheless, if the religious right is moving towards embracing the "social gospel," don't look for the religious left to embrace the "personal gospel" -- specifically, the idea that God expects individuals to live holy personal lives, including (but not limited to) abiding by orthodox Christian sexual teachings. Catholicism has the whole picture, though Catholics themselves have been in general ineffective in living it out, with progressives and orthodox Catholics falling into the same dichotomy as progressive and orthodox Evangelicals. There is no mainstream political home for Christians who believe in, to steal a phrase appropriated by Wendell Berry, "the whole horse." If the Democratic Party ever showed signs of making itself that kind of home, you can be sure the mainstream media would freak out about how "stealth Evangelicals" were sneaking into the Democratic Party to ruin it just like they ruined the GOP.

Bottom line: I would rather see the new generation of Evangelicals sticking around the Republican Party to help rebuild it after the Great Thumping of 2008. But we'll see. I do know that what Kirkpatrick reports in his piece -- about the generational divide leading to the Evangelical crack-up -- mirrors what I've noticed in my speaking to conservative, especially religious conservative, audiences about "Crunchy Cons." Older conservatives have no idea what I'm talking about, and wonder who let the liberal in the back door. Younger conservatives surround me after the talk and want to know more. Something really is happening, but I don't think any of us can say for sure now what it is.