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.
The founding generation of leaders like Falwell and Dobson, who
first guided evangelicals into Republican politics 30 years ago, is
passing from the scene. Falwell died in the spring. Paul Weyrich, 65,
the indefatigable organizer who helped build Falwell’s Moral Majority
and much of the rest of the movement, is confined to a wheelchair after
losing his legs because of complications from a fall. Dobson, who is 71
and still vigorous, is already planning for a succession at Focus on
the Family; it is expected to tack toward the less political family
advice that is its bread and butter.
The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that expunged
political and theological moderates from the Southern Baptist
Convention are retiring or dying off, too. And in September, when I
called a spokesman for the ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James
Kennedy, another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I
learned that Kennedy had “gone home to the Lord” at 2 a.m. that
morning.
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.”
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