E.J. Dionne’s new book, Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over, is the discussion topic at TPM Book Club this week. From his Dionne’s post this morning:
On significant parts of the right and left, there is a sense that religion always has been and always will be a conservative force. There are Republican candidates and political operatives who assume that religious people live on the political right, care primarily about issues such as gay marriage and abortion, and will forever be part of the GOP’s political base. There are liberals — though fewer than conservatives think — who buy this Republican account and write off religious people as backward and reactionary busybodies obsessed with sex.
Souled Out insists that religious faith does not lead ineluctably to conservative political convictions. It argues that the era of the religious Right is over. Its collapse is part of a larger decline of a certain style of ideological conservatism that reached high points in 1980 and 1994 but suffered a series of decisive and I believe fatal setbacks during George W. Bush’s second term. The end of the religious Right does not signal a decline in evangelical Christianity. On the contrary, it is a sign of a new reformation among Christians who are disentangling their great movement from a political machine. This historic change will require liberals and conservatives alike to abandon their sometimes narrow views of who religious Americans are and what they believe.
This is another reason Obama is important. He can help to ease the transition of right-leaning but sane evangelicals toward the left because he can speak credibly and eloquently the language religious (i.e., most) Americans understand. Those who have been leaning right for want of someone they can embrace to the left has caused an enormously significant defection of people who would otherwise be the natural constituency of the Democrats. Abortion, of course, plays a huge role in this, and it will continue to be an unsettling wedge issue. Someday, when we have more perspective, we will understand, regardless whether we are pro or anti-abortion, how tragically stupid and unnecessarily divisive that decision was.
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