Evangelicals: A schism in the Republican base

As pastor of Wichita’s Immanuel Baptist Church, Terry Fox was one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in Kansas. His fiery sermons, broadcast on local TV and radio, made Kansas the epicenter of the pro-life movement and helped compel state legislators to outlaw gay marriage. But in August, his board of deacons fired him. They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff! a stunned Fox said. Fox’s unseating, said David Kirkpatrick in The New York Times Magazine, is among the most visible signs that the evangelical movement is coming apart. As perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America, the religious right played a decisive role in setting the conservative agenda, with its votes twice electing George W. Bush as president. But now, deeply disappointed by Bush’s many failures and unable to agree on a successor, they’re divided, angry, and adrift. The Republicans,’’ says Marvin Olasky, editor of the evangelical magazine World, have blown it.

There are good reasons for this disintegration, said Frank Rich in The New York Times. Evangelicals were naturally dismayed to find out that many of their self-appointed moral emperors had no clothes: The Rev. Ted Haggard got caught paying for massages’’ from a gay prostitute, and anti-gay-marriage crusaders Sens. David Vitter and Larry Craig were caught in extramarital pursuits. In the past two years, disgusted evangelicals have been tacking to a different course than the values hacks’’ who claim to lead them—James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. That’s especially true among younger evangelicals, said Terry Mattingly in the Knoxville, Tenn., News-Sentinel. Insofar as they’re political at all, they believe Jesus would want them to help the poor and the powerless, not condemn gays or clamor for war. And unlike their elders, these 20-somethings have little inclination to fill their bookshelves with Left Behind novels or sing pseudo-romantic praise choruses in sprawling megachurches.

The upshot of this realignment is already apparent, said Michelle Boorstein in The Washington Post. Five years ago, a Pew Research Center poll found, nearly 90 percent of white evangelicals approved of Bush; today, only 49 percent do. Only 60 percent are planning to vote Republican in 2008. Dan Hopkins, a 56-yearold Dallas real estate developer and lifelong Republican, is typical of these disaffected Christians. Furious with Republican politicians for ignoring the plight of illegal immigrants and taking the U.S. into a savage war in Iraq, Hopkins is considering voting Democratic for the first time in his life. The old guard of the religious right, he says, had ‘‘the same level of fanatics as in the Middle East.

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Most evangelicals wouldn’t go that far, said Naomi Schaefer Riley in The Wall Street Journal. While they have clearly lost their enthusiasm for the GOP,’’ that doesn’t mean they’re all turning into liberal Democrats. Instead, their votes are now up for grabs. To understand the new evangelical view of politics, there’s no better example than the Rev. Gene Carlson of Wichita, said Kirkpatrick in the Times. Once deeply involved in conservative politics and the anti-abortion movement, Carlson, 70, has soured on politics— when you mix politics and religion,’’ he says, you get politics’’— and now considers himself an independent. He leans left on social-welfare issues and considers it his Christian duty to protect the environment and stop global warming. The religious right peaked a long time ago,’’ Carlson says. “It has seen its heyday. Something new is coming.’’