Long and brilliant piece in today’s NYT Magazine on the cracking up of the evangelical political world. I’ll write more later but here is the piece’s core:
Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.
Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.
The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.
posted October 27, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Hi, I just watched this on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9760BfiSSCA&NR=1 and I wanted to let you know that I support you entirely.
I see no reason for the Democratic Party to be against Christian values and I see nothing but hypocrisy in the Republican Party claiming to be the party of religious values.
The Republican Party is the party of wealthy people who support policies for the benefit of the wealthy regardless of how hurting the impoverished are.
The Democratic Party may be off on a thousand and one issues but, in my opinion, they’re the only major-party option available for people with the values of the Bible. If only they would join the Democratic alliance and change it from the inside…
Anyhow, thank you again for caring for those who are not well-off, despite the fact that most people of your belief-persuasion have bought into the puppet show of the Republican Leadership.
Cheers,
mnuez
http://www.mnuez.blogspot.com
posted October 28, 2007 at 2:24 am
Great article, David.
It sounds like a lot of other people are going through the same struggles between politics and faith that you have.
posted October 28, 2007 at 7:28 am
I look forward to hearing your take on this. My first reaction to the article was, if your pilgrimage ends in D.C. that ain’t Jesus nor Moses you’re following.
posted October 28, 2007 at 7:46 am
Seems to me that some are still searching for Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount….that alone provides much love and guidance.
posted October 28, 2007 at 9:03 am
I fail to understand why everyone always aligns the Republican party with the “rich” and the Democratic party with the “Poor” when neither do anything for either side… they all work for themselves. I’m considered the bottom of the bottom of “Middle-class” and I am a republican, on the same token.. I’m not rich, nor do I vote for them to make me rich. people need to step back, and look at the system, it’s really an us-them system.. not a republican – democrat.. they are all the same. they just happen to align themselves one way or another to make it seem publicly like they are actually going for the issues that matter to those that vote, nothing more. ever wonder why they never do what they say? I rest my case..
posted October 28, 2007 at 9:52 am
Personally, I think it is a good sign that Evangelicals are drifting away from their leaders. Too often, it seems like those who claim to be Christians are following the leadership of a man in power, not Christ.
posted October 28, 2007 at 1:26 pm
This election will fracture the evangelical right from the monolithic chains of a one-size-fits-all view of the James Dobson’s of the world. If 9/11 has taught me anything it is that a binding of religion and politics is lethal.
It really is the end of:
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”
posted October 28, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Sauron for President, Zero? Tempting.
posted October 28, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Actually, Cthulu for president, (when you’re tired of the lesser of two evils.)
posted October 28, 2007 at 9:40 pm
As soon as homosexuals and their promoters started showing up in the GOP, it was time for Christians to step away from them as well. James Dobson was right yet again.
Donny
posted October 28, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Zero, the greater is the creeping crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.