Is The Evangelical Right Really Turning on Itself?

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 1:26 PM on April 6, 2009.

I'm a bit late looking at this piece from Friday's Washington Post by conservative columnist Kathleen Parker (Parker, if you'll recall, is a smarter-than-average right-winger who was absolutely excoriated by her National Review readers for the heretical view that Sarah Palin was a dangerous know-nothing who had no place being within a heartbeat of the Oval Office).

In it, Parker describes a rift between the old-guard of the Religious Right, and a younger generation who believe that their leadership has just been too accommodating, and should have worked harder to beat back the arrival of the 21st 20th 19th century ...

Is the Christian right finished as a political entity? Or, more to the point, are principled Christians finished with politics?

These questions have been getting fresh air lately as frustrated conservative Christians question the pragmatism -- defined as the compromising of principles -- of the old guard. One might gently call the current debate a generational rift.

The older generation, represented by such icons as James Dobson, who recently retired as head of Focus on the Family, has compromised too much, according to a growing phalanx of disillusioned Christians. Pragmatically speaking, the Christian coalition of cultural crusaders didn't work.

For proof, one need look no further than Dobson himself, who was captured on tape recently saying that the big cultural battles have all been lost.

That's right, Dobson, who said after the 9/11 attacks, "I certainly believe that God is displeased with America for its pride and arrogance, for killing 40 million unborn babies, for the universality of profanity and for other forms of immorality" isn't sufficiently dogmatic for the young 'uns.

Actually, that's not fair; Parker argues not that their leaders' rhetoric has been lacking in zeal, but that their willingness to compromise in order to hitch their proverbial wagon to the fortunes of the GOP, a party whose leadership doesn't care about school prayer half as much as repealing the Estate Tax, is the problem.

[Christian Broadcaster Steve Deace's] point was that established Christian activist groups too often settle for lesser evils in exchange for electing Republicans. He cited as examples Dobson's support of Mitt Romney and John McCain, neither of whom is pro-life or pro-family enough from Deace's perspective.

Compromise may be the grease of politics, but it has no place in Christian orthodoxy, according to Deace.

Put another way, Christians may have no place in the political fray of dealmaking. That doesn't mean one disengages from political life, but it might mean that the church shouldn't be a branch of the Republican Party. It might mean trading fame and fortune (green rooms and fundraisers) for humility and charity.

Parker goes on to quote E. Ray Moore -- "founder of the South Carolina-based Exodus Mandate, an initiative to encourage Christian education and home schooling":

Moore, who considers himself a member of the Christian right, thinks the movement is imploding.

"It's hard to admit defeat, but this one was self-inflicted," he wrote in an e-mail. "Yes, Dr. Dobson and the pro-family or Christian right political movement is a failure; it would have made me sad to say this in the past, but they have done it to themselves."

For Christians such as Moore -- and others better known, such as columnist Cal Thomas, a former vice president for the Moral Majority -- the heart of Christianity is in the home, not the halls of Congress or even the courts. And the route to a more moral America is through good works -- service, prayer and education -- not political lobbying.

Of course, the rank-and-file Christian theocrat's problem doesn't really lie with his or her leaders' spinelessness; it's a result of living in a country with a Constitution that was written by men of the Enlightenment who had an inherent distrust of organized religion controlling or influencing their new government. They bent over backwards to avoid creating a "Christian nation," and as long as that remains the goal of many within the Evangelical movement, it will continue to bump its head against the walls that the "founders" erected.

That aside, if true, a new movement to pull back from electoral politics and attempt to influence the culture through example -- by leading what they consider to be the "Christian life" -- would be a welcome development indeed. Contrary to the ubiquitous charge that liberals like myself are intolerant of religion, I don't care at all what people believe as long as they're not trying to shove those beliefs down other people's throats.

Anyway, that the Christian Right is going through a moment of introspection is natural, given how much energy and resources they've invested in politics and how little they've gotten for it in return. But there's another question here: whether this a genuine movement away from the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics or merely a savvy strategic move in the face of the GOP's tanking popularity and deeply structural problems with an electorate whose rapidly shifting demographics threaten to relegate it to the status of a rump, regional party. In other words, is there a genuine movement afoot among white Evangelicals to re-examine how their religious activities inform the rest of their public life, or are we just looking at rats deserting a sinking ship?

I don't know the answer. But a few weeks ago we ran an article by an Evangelical insider titled, "The Coming Evangelical Collapse," and a friend of mine -- a writer whose beat is the Religious Right -- sent an email calling the piece "typical right propaganda designed to get their people worried and organized in a different way." My friend then asked, "do progressives really think Evangelicalism is dying and they can sing 'ding, dong the witch is dead?'"

I'm not counting my dead witches just yet, but the changing face of the Evangelical movement is certainly a development on which to keep an eye.

Tagged as: republicans, christian right, evangelical movement

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.