THE EVANGELICAL CRACK UP

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DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, NY TIMES - 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28Evangelicals-t.html?ex=
1351224000&en=bbd7e5f2c720d54c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss


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