Breakdown of the Religious Right

I haven't been getting a lot of sleep this week, so it was great to stay in bed a little bit this morning, and wake up to this autumn morning at its peak already. When I took the dog out, the air was chilly but not cold yet. I'm going to have to rake pretty soon; yesterday I was trying to figure out when they're coming for the leaves. I'm guessing that by the end of this week they will all have fallen. Well, that's all right, I enjoy raking. Right now, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, with some echoing electric guitar playing "Shenandoah" on WPFW. It sounds like a guy's using a slide. There's an electric bass, a little percussion, some strings -- no, that's an electric guitar with effects on it. I'll have to wait to find out who this is. I have an idea, but I'm going to wait.

The New York Times magazine has a major story this morning called "Evangelical Crackup," about the collapse of the religious right. I think that's an unfortunate title, because really the theme of the story is that people who describe their religious beliefs as Evangelical are getting tired of the conservative political pitch all the time, and are leaving the Republican Party that panders to them. The point is that religion and politics are separating, not that there is any weakening of the influence of Evangelicals -- they're just not as easily controlled by certain political interests as they used to be.

It's written in that you-have-all-the-time-in-the-world style that magazine writers cultivate, sort of like my Sunday morning style, sorry. Anyway since they're a magazine and this is a blog, I'm going to skip through and pull out the more focused paragraphs.

First the author introduces us to a character, a forty-something Southern Baptist preacher with a mega-church in Wichita, Kansas, who had been pushing Republican politics for a long time, and then, last year, left the congregation.

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

These days, Fox has taken his fire and brimstone in search of a new pulpit. He rented space at the Johnny Western Theater at the Wild West World amusement park until it folded. Now he preaches at a Best Western hotel. “I don’t mind telling you that I paid a price for the political stands I took,” Fox said. “The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals.” Evangelical Crackup (May require free registration)

Well, I admit, I don't know how the teachings of Jesus could result in a weekly sermon on the evils of abortion, either. It sounds like there may have been some actual Christians at the church, who wanted something other than Republican Party talking points.

And of course this guy is painting himself as a victim, that seems to be one of the cornerstones of the whole religious-right business, feeling sorry for yourself.

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.

Just three years ago they thought they could see the Promised Land in Montgomery County, too. When the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum first emerged, right after the 2004 elections, with their goal of recalling the entire MCPS school board, you could see they felt empowered by the Christianism of the White House and the "mandate" of the election win. This was the trumpet calling them into action, to "take back America" and make it the Christian country they thought it was intended to be. Start by getting the sodomites out of our schools.

And we've seen this fast deterioration here in our little county. Three years ago the rubber hit the road for them. They met, they broke into groups, they organized, they reached out to the big organizations (including the Republican Party, who sent people to the CRC's earliest meetings), and now, three years later, they are down to a couple of blog-trolls and somebody to mail out the occasional inflammatory email or letter to the editor.

The article discusses how the original generation of rightwing preachers is dying off.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

Jesus kicked over some tables in the temple and called out some hypocrites, but his central teaching was the golden rule, which he promoted to an extreme, advising followers to turn the other cheek, to care for the downtrodden and the sinful, to love their enemies. I always read his words as words of warmth, of love, winning people over by setting examples -- he explicitly taught against public display of private religious behaviors, his was a message of peace.

So it has always seemed weird to me how these churches twisted that into an anti-everything-and-everybody belief system, one hundred degrees different from the teaching of the Beatitudes, for instance. And now it appears some people sitting in the pews were wondering the same thing. But the religious right was not a grassroots religious movement, this was carefully created and cultivated by the big-money guys in Washington, and imposed on believers in the old-time religion who trusted their ministers.

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

I won't comment on recent strange adventures by Democratic hopefuls to win over this group, or how the religious right's leaders are talking about forming their own political party. It's enough to say we don't know where this is heading.

You can learn something from this paragraph:

In June of last year, in one of the few upsets since conservatives consolidated their hold on the denomination 20 years ago, the establishment’s hand-picked candidates — well-known national figures in the [Southern Baptist] convention — lost the internal election for the convention’s presidency. The winner, Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., campaigned on a promise to loosen up the conservatives’ tight control. He told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.” (It’s a formulation that comes up a lot in evangelical circles these days.)

OK, that's cool, they're just not mad about it. That has been one of the things that made this so unwelcome. People like the CRC's leadership have treated the rest of us as if we were (sometimes literally) working for Satan himself. Their anger -- at the school board, at gays and lesbians, at liberals -- overwhelmed everything else. I have always said, if it was a matter of adjusting the curriculum to accommodate the concerns of more conservative parents, nobody would have minded, that kind of discussion is expected, and it is positive. Discussion among people with differing points of view makes the final product better.

But they were always so mad about it. You couldn't talk with them.

Southern Baptists called their denomination’s turn to the right the “conservative resurgence,” meaning both a crackdown on unorthodox doctrine and a corresponding expulsion of political moderates. Page said he considered his election “a clear sign” that rank-and-file Southern Baptists felt the “conservative ascendancy has gone far enough.”

Page is meeting personally with all the leading presidential candidates in both parties — Republican and Democrat. (His home state of South Carolina is holding an early primary.) But unlike some of his predecessors, he won’t endorse any of them, he said.

“Most of us Southern Baptists are right-wing Republicans,” he added. “But we also recognize that times change.” For example, Page said Christians should be wary of Republican ties to “big business.”

This is sounding like a very healthy change. The Evangelicals have their beliefs, and yep, they're one conservative bunch of people. But they have been taking orders from Washington, and that's going to stop, it sounds like.

Well, I'm only halfway through this article, and this post is getting too long. Plus, I'm indoors. Oh, by the way, if I'd guessed who that guitar player was, I'd have been wrong. It was Bill Frisell with Ry Cooder, I wouldn't have guessed that, even though of course I listen to both of those players, and actually I've heard that song a lot of times, I just forgot. That slide, of course; those effects, of course.

Look, if you're interested in the direction America will be taking, go fill your coffee cup, get comfortable at the computer, and read through this article. The religious right has had a lot of power for a long time. You see the Democratic candidates risking everything to court that group -- will it pay off? The evangelical Christians as a group are realizing they have been taken advantage of, they've been treated like a bunch of bumpkins; will it work for Obama and Hillary to come around and act like Karl Rove did four years ago? There're a lot of votes there -- who's going to get them? A third party? It is possible.

America has all kinds of people, and our contract among ourselves is that we will accept and respect one another, different as we are. That means somebody like me learns to accept the conservative Christian, and it means the conservative Christian learns to accept somebody like me. I am not working for Satan, and tell you the truth, when somebody assumes that I am it puts a bad taste in my mouth. And I can accept their religious beliefs, their conservative values, that actually doesn't bother me, but I can't let them force me to live that way. Let's see where all this goes.