I found Frances Fitzgerald’s piece in the New York Review interesting for trying to parse out some of the complexity that lies behind the word "evangelical."
Christian right activists, most of whom are themselves evangelicals, claim credit for these votes. Further, the activists tend to speak as if they represent the evangelical community as a whole, and because they have made their voices heard, many nonevangelicals believe that they do. For many Americans, the very word "evangelical" conjures up a vision of people railing against liberals, secularists, homosexuals, and the teaching of evolution in the public schools. But such a view is inaccurate. Evangelicals are hardly identical with the Christian right, and moderate evangelical leaders have recently been making the distinction clear by publicly airing their differences with the right and challenging its positions on political issues.
One interesting defector from the Dobson/Fallwell/Robertson mold is Rick Warren. And whether or not you’d ever want to become a member of his church, you have to recognize that he’s an honest man trying to respond to the spirit of the gospels in a way the zombie Christianists are not:
Important support for these centrist initiatives has come from Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, the pastor of a huge church in Orange County, California, and, next to Billy Graham, by far the best known of all evangelical preachers. Just before the 2004 election, Warren sent out a letter to his network of 150,000 fellow pastors telling them that pro-life and pro-family issues should determine how evangelicals voted. But he sent the same network a letter urging them to put pressure on Bush to increase foreign aid, provide debt relief, and eliminate trade barriers that hurt the poor. The following year he called upon his own 22,000-member congregation to support an effort in Rwanda, backed by its government, to alleviate hunger, teach literacy, and slow the spread of AIDS.
His ultimate goal, Warren announced, was to enlist millions of Christians worldwide in the struggle against poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Like Cizik, he had gone through a form of conversion. "I have been so busy building my church that I have not cared about the poor," he told pastors in Kigali. "I have sinned, and I am sorry."[15] Warren doesn’t criticize Christian right leaders, but in the past year he has scandalized them by signing the February 2006 global warming statement, by publicly condemning Bush administration policies that permit torture, by making a trip to Syria, and—worst of all—by inviting Barack Obama to speak at his second global AIDS conference. What will come of his international project is not yet clear, but simply in espousing such causes, Warren influences many evangelicals in this country.
I don’t know that much about Warren, and I’ve not read his book. And while the kind of Christian sensibility within which I operate is quite different from his, there is a lot of common ground. Whereas when I read about Dobson or Fallwell, there is close to zero. They have as much to do with the spirit of Christianity as Reverend Moon and his Unification Church. They are cult leaders, not Christian leaders. I think that Warren’s openness to Obama indicates that he might be a fusion candidate that will appeal to sane conservative Christians who have not joined the Christianist cult. And that’s important if we are to have a redefining moment in American politics along the lines I’ve been describing as ‘radically centrist’.
The point of Fitzgerald’s article is to point out that not all evangelicals have drunk the Christianist Kool-Aid. Their problem lies in that no candidate has emerged with whom they can identify, who thinks about the world they way they do, and so they have voted Republican by default. This has to change because way too many Americans are evangelicals, and they have enormous power in elections when they are aroused and organized.
Evangelicals have a disproportionate part in what pollsters call the
"God gap" between the two parties. They make up a quarter of the
population—around 75 million people —and a far higher percentage of
them are frequent churchgoers than are mainline Protestants and
Catholics. Furthermore, the group as a whole has for a decade voted
Republican in much greater proportion than the other two groups. In
2000, 68 percent of evangelicals voted for George Bush; in 2004, 78
percent of them did. Last summer, polls showed that the war in Iraq,
corruption, and the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina had
brought the evangelicals’ approval ratings for Bush and the GOP down by
twenty points in just two years. But on the last Election Day they
turned out in their usual numbers, and over 70 percent of them voted
for Republican congressional candidates. White evangelicals have, in
other words, become the GOP’s most reliable constituency, and they
normally provide about a third of the Republican votes.
That 70% number is pretty discouraging, but the "default" rationale might explain it. And it might change if a guy like Obama can present a plausible alternative. I am far from endorsing Obama at this point, but he’s certainly the most intriquing of the candidates, and I’m hoping at this point that he either won’t be revealed to be something other than he presents himself to be or that he won’t be destroyed by the process. I’m also not clear yet who is backing him–who the people are who will be putting the most pressure on him.
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