It's long, coming in at 8,000 words. But it's essential reading -- a portal into a political future of unknown potential, as well as the basis of a new guessing game about how Democrats can screw this up.
The "it" is David Kirkpatrick's New York Times Magazine piece, "The Evangelical Crackup." Kirkpatrick, who covered the incestuous affair between conservative Christianity and Bushian politics for the Times during the 2004 election, got to "wonder[ing] how the world was looking from the pulpits and pews" these days. So he traveled to Ground Zero -- Wichita, Kansas, "as close as any place to the heart of conservative Christian America" -- to take a little look-see. What he found were even more internal divisions and troubles than have been reported of late.
There's so much to savor in Kirkpatrick's reporting, I'm tempted to quote extensively and just leave it at that. But I'll offer merely the gist of it, along with a concluding remark. And without fear of overstating the piece, the gist is this: The politically aligned Christian movement, as a unified, singular power, is not only in bitter shambles; it is toast -- effectively over as anything resembling a Republican base in 2008.
Drawing from three separate paragraphs, here's a sewn-together sentence that may do some violence to elegant syntax, but not, I think, to Kirkpatrick's general findings in his own words: "Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land..., [yet] today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders ... [and] ... a new generation of pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party -- some as likely to lean left as right -- is beginning to speak up."
What developments made the difference? The war, for one -- perhaps the one, for now. "Every time I visited an evangelical church in 2004," writes Kirkpatrick, "it seemed that a member’s brother or cousin had just returned from Iraq with reports that much greater progress was being made than the news media let on." But not now. Admittedly what Kirkpatrick offers is anecdotal, but it's powerfully anecdotal and hard to diminish in its importance. Now, there's little more than disdain for both the war effort and its principal driver.
"'We know we want to get rid of Bush,'" Linda J. Hogle, a product demonstrator at Sam’s Club, told me when I asked her about the 2008 election at her evangelical church’s Fourth of July picnic. 'I am glad he can’t run again,' agreed her friend, Floyd Willson. Hogle and Willson both voted for President Bush in 2004. Both are furious at the war and are looking to vote for a Democrat next year. 'Upwards of a thousand boys that have been needlessly killed, it is all just politics,' Willson said."
But there's something else in play. And for the long term, that something holds far more political kick -- against the right, and, if only by default, in the left's favor. As Kirkpatrick puts it, there's "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."
This philosophical "rift" is real and widening between the old bulls, such as James Dobson, and the movement's younger movers and shakers, such as those who've actually read and comprehended the Bible's message. As generational as it may be, however, there is evidence the rift has been subject to considerable seepage:
Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 -- the future of the church -- were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)
OK, I'm guilty of quoting a trifle more extensively than I planned. But the above is key -- the key, perhaps -- to a more vigorous, muscular and vastly expanded left in America.
So, how can the left's principal voice -- however inadequate, that would be the Democratic Party -- screw this up? How can it miss its shot at a natural co-optation that would smooth the electoral path to a more honorable America?
Easy. It can keep right on doing what it's doing. It can continue trying to please the older bulls and their stubbornly conservative but diminishing Christian legions by continuing to cozy up to Bush & Co.'s bellicose ways. And it can stay hooked up to the corporate I.V. of social-justice-suppressing and vote-controlling cash.
In short, the party can, by simply remaining itself -- itself as we now know it -- utterly and easily dismiss this rarest of opportunities: to actually grow in power and numbers by actually doing the right and honorable things.
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to support p m carpenter's commentary -- and thank you!