on Robertson and Dobson

There's always a tension between radicalism and pragmatism and it has always been there in the evangelical political movement. In the past, though, the establishment candidate has always been able to manage by paying lip service to one and being loyal to the other. The problem now is, there is no consensus candidate to either belong to the pragmatists and suck up to the idealists or visa-versa. People are actually having to choose and the tension that's always been veiled will now be obvious.

What will be interesting, though, is how this works at the micro level. Parties and movements always have factions but so has every Church I've ever belonged to and every community I've lived in. What will be most interesting to me is whether the schisms will be limited to the leaders or spill over into the congregations themselves and local party offices, too. In many ways I hope not, but I've left the fellowship hall a few times thinking it would be cathartic and healthy to have a brawl during the coffee.

The usher guild, too. What a nest of jackals.

The fact that James Dobson is so extreme explains exactly why he has had so little ultimate political success.

Americans as a whole do not like extremists.

Thanks for this insightful and informative post.

Hey, there's a great slogan out there for these two as they go off campaigning: "Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross."

"Robertson wins a decision at a time."

And yet, the score is that the Republican margins and holds on power, which he helped create and through which he is powerful, are diminishing rapidly.

In D.C. all now depends for him on at very best a diminished Republican Presidency without a social policy mandate and a single Justice margin on the Supreme Court.

In Virginia's state government Republican power is fading. Within five years, on trend, it will be a thinly but reliably Democratic state.

There seems to be a trend of increasing geographical contraction of Christian Right organizations and power and leaders, as I look at the map. Here where I am Archbishop O'Malley seems thoroughly defeated and has faded into the background. The Reverend Kenneth Blackwell seems to be greatly toning down his ambitions in Ohio, focussing his efforts in D.C. or perhaps Kentucky and Tennessee now. Oral Roberts is evidently not doing so well. Focus On The Family is struggling, cutting people from its rolls, in Colorado Springs. Rick Warren is now easily the best know minister in Southern California. The LDS Church is doing its all to prop Mitt Romney as its ticket to achieving national legitimacy, but it's hitting limits. In central Florida, Coral Ridge Ministries was already in decline before D. James Kennedy died.

Not sure of the point here - I can see that Robertson is above all a politician, but choosing Guiliani over Clinton is certainly not going to do more to advance the so-called moral issues. So is it more that he is ultimately more committed to the political right than he is to his moral issues. Fine, but then he can't have it both ways. Dobson, while his behaviour towards other evangelical leaders is bullying and un-Christlike, is at least consistent.

Incidentally, I can point to plenty of perfectly orthodox Christians , who are profoundly moral in their personal lives and who hunger to be godly, whose politics are left of centre, who believe that the evidence points to greater government intervention in the economy and redistribution of wealth both increases general wealth and social justice. Thus posts like the last one which seek to claim that only true believers in a certain type of conservatism are "real" Christians are wrong - and frankly rather offensive.

I have had a number of serious problems with Pat Robertson over the past few years. From calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, to telling us that in 2006 there would be a more devastating Hurricane hitting the United States than Hurricane Katrina (there wasn't), to recently suspending a law student at his University for posting an unflattering but unedited picture of him on that student's personal facebook page.

All of that has been since 9/11 when he blamed homosexuality in America for the attacks.

It's a shame. I know that Pat confesses Jesus Christ as Lord, but I also know that when he does things like endorse a pro-choice, pro-gay rights candidate, he drags along with him the reputations of a lot of Christians, and the reputation of the Christian Church in America as a whole.

Perhaps its telling. What, with so many of our American denominational churches embracing homosexuality and other non-biblically supported ways of life--we should expect that with the church, its leaders will follow.

Ultimately there is no condemnation in Jesus Christ, but that also doesn't mean that there should be endorsement of sin.