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Ed Stetzer, who runs the numbers for the Southern Baptist Convention, has an interesting  essay up on the Christianity Today website, in which he answers the burning question: Why do evangelicals lie about how religion is doing in America? His answer, which includes a useful review of the actual data, is that in order to pump up the troops to go out and exercise the Great Commission, you've got to make things seem worse than they are.

To be sure, Stetzer doesn't have anything to say about his own grim reports on the demographics of the SBC--probably because, in that particular case, the facts are true. (He does point out that the only denominations that are growing are a couple if Pentecostal ones.) For a review of the SBC situation, see Andy Manis' article in the latest issue of Religion in the News.

The re-emergence of the Ensign sex saga last week put the C Street Gang (aka The Fellowship, The Family, The National Prayer Breakfast, etc.) back in the crosshairs of the liberal media. We knew that they had tried with indifferent success to get Mark Sanford and wife back together. Now it turns out that they twisted John Ensign's arm to write a "Dear Cindy" letter to his inamorata, which he immediately told her to ignore. Call them the gang that couldn't pray straight.

That letter, filled as it was with references to what God did and didn't want, inspired Vanity Fair to produce a sharp response from the Almighty, while NYT's Gail Collins offered her own opera buffa take on the doings of the "Prayer House." For those whose taste runs to the dark side, there was Rachel Maddow's two-barreled interview on Thursday and Friday of Jeff Sharlet, who wrote the book on The Family (The Family), and who laid on his ominous portrait of a powerful cabal of totalitarian "Jesus plus nothing" Christians able to pull numerous strings with Washington's movers and shakers. (No mention, though, of Hillary Clinton's involvement in the group.)

My sense is that The Family's heyday was some decades ago, when anti-Communism was still a force in the world, and establishmentarian Christian conservativism had a distinct role to play. The use of Christianity for tough partisan warfare, which came into its own in the 1980s and was honed to a fine edge by Tom DeLay, Karl Rove & Co., was an entirely different game--antipathetic to The Family's bi-partisan approach to life. Still, it's possible that there are still important revelations to come of what The Family guys have been up to recently.

That said, it's worth bearing in mind that evangelical Protestant religion in America has always been possessed of the imperative to bring male misbehavior under control--be it drinking, fighting, gambling, or screwing around. In that regard, the C Street collective that tried to get Sanford and Ensign back on the straight and narrow was simply doing what came naturally. In itself no particular biggie, in other words. 

You've got your Mainline Protestants, your African-Americans, your Catholics, your Jews, your Muslims, your Hindu women. But nary a representative of a mainstream white or Latino evangelical body--be it the National Association of Evangelicals or the Southern Baptist Convention or the Assemblies of God or the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. The total evangelical presence consists of dyed-in-the-wool centrist outliers Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Melissa Rogers of Wake Forest. What does that tell you? (Press release after the jump.)

Since the outbreak of the Great Notre Dame Invitation War, there has been a certain journalistic impulse to discern political consequences in President Obama's pro-choice words and deeds, with the focus on Catholics. GOP partisan Michael Gerson was out of the blocks two weeks ago with a column contending that Obama's Catholic support was faltering. At the end of last week, Time's Amy Sullivan delivered herself of a piece titled, "Catholic Democrats: Is Their Support Fraying?" The answer, actually, is no.

Here's the problem, journalistically speaking. There is no evidence that the Catholic vote for president is affected by a candidate's position on abortion. Yet you can't just tell your editor that it makes no difference to rank-and-file Catholics that a bunch of bishops are het up over the president's abortion moves, or she'll want to know why the hell you're writing the story in the first place.

This morning, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown took the inside-the-Beltway track, reporting on an increase in activity among the anti-abortion organizations in DC--not exactly stop-the-presses news. To her credit, Brown notes:

In a poll released last week, Obama's disapproval ratings among Catholic and Protestant voters rose between February and April, but it was consistent with an increase in dissatisfaction among all voters. The fluctuation among white evangelicals was more severe, according to the survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. A 31 percent disapproval rating in February jumped to 47 percent in April, making it one of the steeper spikes among demographic groups.

Even this bespeaks the kind of slight massaging that journalists do when the statistics don't really support the storyline. The truly honest way to put it would have been:
 

Obama's approval rating among Catholic and Protestant voters rebounded in April after a drop from February to March, suggesting that the president's abortion positions have thus far had little if any effect on voters' opinions. The only faith group that might be paying attention are the evangelicals, whose approval of Mr. Obama has experienced a steady decline since January.

I'm inclined to doubt that last surmise as well, however. Look at it this way. Obama won 47 percent of white Catholic voters; as of this month, 56 percent of them approve his performance, for a net of +9 percentage points. Among white evangelicals, the numbers are 24, 37, +13. White Mainline Protestants are 44, 54, +10. And for all whites, the numbers are 43, 55, +12.

In sum, Obama's approval rating for each major white religious grouping is currently about 10 points higher than that group's vote for him in November--exactly what the margin is for white people as a whole. In conclusion, Obama's moves on abortion have not had any discernible effect on his support among voters presumed to care most about that issue.

With a new magazine to hawk, Rick Warren has broken media silence and given interviews to Larry King and Christianity Today's Sarah Pulliam.Students of the great one's purpose-driven public life have taken note, and noted certain inconsistencies between past and present pronouncements. Both Gilgoff and BaptistPlanet make clear that Warren is now representing himself as softer on gay marriage than he appeared heretofore. To be fair, he was something of a reluctant warrior during the run-up to the Proposition Vote. What's interesting is that he seems to be letting the zeitgeist blow him along as it listeth--toward the recognition that gay marriage is where America is headed.

Let me just call attention to a couple of Warrenisms. First, when Pulliam asked for his views on the Obama interation of the faith-based initiative, he said:

Those are great goals. My fear is that if all of a sudden you have to compromise your convictions to be part of the faith base, that will kill it. People will simply ignore it. Saddleback has never accepted government money for any PEACE Plan project because we don't want the strings attached to it. While the faith-based initiatives have great promise, if it becomes an issue where you can't just hire Christians in a Christian school, that will effectively kill them.

On the one hand, he is exactly right to make the point that those who see their service missions as religious should steer clear of government funding. On the other, no one has proposed to do away with longstanding rules exempting bona-fide Christian schools from anti-discrimination laws against hiring based on faith. The question is whether you should get the hiring exemption when you're using government funds to advance a public purpose.

Then there's this, in response to Larry King's question about John Meacham's ARIS-based Newsweek cover story, "The Decline of Christian America."

KING: OK. Do you think Christianity is slipping in America? That's the front cover of "Newsweek," out today. Quite a loss occurring in the Christian community. There you see the headline.

WARREN: Well, I would say it's the best of times and the worst of times. First place, I don't think that all of the questions that are asked in surveys are always as objective as they could be. For instance, if you ask people, are you a Protestant -- and the number of Protestants has gone down dramatically in the last 30 years. I don't even call myself a Protestant.

So terminologies are changing. I don't think faith is changing that much.

On the one hand, the ARIS surveys don't ask people if they're Protestant. They ask, "What is your religion, if any?" And the fact that the number of "just Protestants" has declined from 17 million to 5 million in two decades is simply a report on what people say. On the other hand, terminologies are changing. And what the ARIS shows is a huge increase in those who call themselves non-denominational Christians and "just Christians"--the Rick Warren people. Not enough, however, to prevent a 10 percentage-point decline in the proportion of Christians in America, with 90 percent of that coming in the non-Catholic portion of the Christian population.

Rick Warren, the new Big Dog of American religion, seems to have dropped out of sight since the Inauguration. Does he have any considered opinions on his friend Barack Obama's efforts to rescue the economy, first steps in foreign policy, or (drum roll) remixed faith-based initiative and designation of Kathleen Sebelius as HHS secretary?

Who knows?

In the NYT obit of Richard John Neuhaus, Laurie Goodstein wrote:

With Charles Colson, the former Watergate felon who became a born-again leader of American evangelicals, Father Neuhaus convened a group that in 1994 produced “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” It was a widely distributed manifesto that initially came under fire by critics, who accused the two men of diluting theological differences for political expediency. But the document was ultimately credited with helping to cement the alliance, which has reshaped American politics.

Picking up on that, U.S. News' Dan Gilgoff, characterizing the alliance as Catholic "brains" and "evangelical brawn," wrote:

Yes, the Catholic-evangelical alliance that Neuhaus helped broker has created a mighty political force. It has been one of the seminal political developments of the past 30 years. Let's just not forget that that marriage has some tensions that are also worth watching. After all, the split between evangelicals, who voted for John McCain by 3 to 1, and Catholics, who broke for Barack Obama after supporting Bush in 2004, is one reason Obama is the president-elect.

Whereupon Beliefnet's Steve Waldman suggested that Neuhaus' passing is an emblem of the the alliance's own passing, as evidenced by the drift of Catholics (back) to the Democrats this past election.

Before this meme solidifies into an article of faith, let's try to be clear about what the putative alliance really amounted to. Yes, Neuhaus and Colson had their project; and yes, some Catholic ways of thinking about social issues trickled down into evangelical brains. That's to say, evangelical biblicism has, for some evangelical activists, been enhanced with some Catholic natural law argumentation and a more intellectually coherent vision of the moral universe. One thinks particularly of George W. Bush's use of the expression "culture of life" in the 2000 election, and the prominence of that expression in the effort to prevent the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube in 2005. (For an article on the subject, see here.) But alliance?

On the ground, the most than can be said is that the religious détente between Catholics and evangelicals has continued to strengthen--thanks mostly to the fact that conservative leaders in both camps take the same positions on abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, etc. But you don't see bishops and leading evangelical clerics issuing joint statements or otherwise palling around together. As I've argued previously, the self-promoting claim that Deal Hudson and Karl Rove engineered an effective evangelical-style political mobilization for Bush among conservative Catholics in 2004 is bogus. At the end of the day, Neuhaus helped further some intellectual interchange among Catholic and evangelical elites, and thereby maybe contributed to lowering the already low level of antagonism between their two communities by a degree or two. The rest is hype.

Gilgoff's got a post up about Rick Warren and Billy Graham that concludes:

But I wonder if it's fair to compare Warren with Graham on responding to the Christian right, given that so much of Graham's time in politics—though by no means all of it—happened before the rise of the Christian right in the 1980s. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was founded in 1950.

Yes, it's fair. The Christian rightists of Graham's early days were, to be sure, more theological than political. But no less formidable for that. Beginning in the 1950s, they attacked him for his "cooperative" approach to evangelism, for his refusal to draw hard doctrinal lines, for his ecumenical openness. And they never stopped. But he never trimmed sail, keeping to his course undeterred.

“Billy Graham’s America,” Grant Wacker’s presidential address at the just concluded annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, not only provided a brilliant summation of Graham’s significance in 20th-century American culture but also suggested a way to understand the current debate over the future of evangelicalism. That's because evangelical leaders like Rick Warren are, after a generation dominated by the religious right, simply finding their way down a path long since trod by the preeminent "cooperative evangelical" of our age. The oddity is that Graham has come to be seen as so sui generis that observers are hardly aware of it.

Here, for example, is a little paean to Warren over on Religion in American History by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, who with Shayne Lee has written a forthcoming book about contemporary evangelical leaders entitled Holy Mavericks:

Consider these snapshots from his recent activities: not many other preachers are friends with the president of Rwanda, write a monthly column for Ladies Home Journal, and receive a standing ovation after speaking at Harvard University. Not many other conservative pastors possess the flexibility to be pro-life and pro-poor, the ingenuity to lead a preaching seminar for rabbis at the University of Judaism, or the versatility to work and dine with homosexual activists while maintaining a firm stance against same-sex marriage. Not many spiritual leaders mentor prominent businesspersons like Rupert Murdock and Jack Welch, or can claim that after three decades of ministry, they have never been alone in a room with a woman other than their wife. Few evangelical pastors are friends with both President George W. Bush and Democratic president-elect Barack Obama, a notable participant at Warren’s 2006 Global Summit on AIDS and the recent Presidential Forum, both at Saddleback Church. And Warren’s latest book, The Purpose of Christmas, adds further insight into the complexity of this holy maverick’s cosmopolitan outlook. It continues to articulate the readable simplicity of the purpose-driven message and hit the major points of conservative evangelical theology (e.g., centrality of Jesus, authority of Bible, etc.). Yet with a closing chapter on Warren’s P.E.A.C.E. plan, it registers as decidedly cosmopolitan in outlook and activist in tone.

The thing is, changing a few names and titles, everything here fits Billy to a T. Yes, Warren built his church into a kind of mini-denomination rather than preaching the Gospel to crowds around the world. Other than that, all that makes him mavericky is that, among those of his generation, he's emulating Graham rather than, say, Jerry Falwell. And that goes for the Africa stuff as well. As Wacker presented it, Graham’s last great accomplishment, beginning two decades ago, was his embrace of “global justice”--an expansion of the evangelical social vision to include the material needs of Christians in the Third World. One might say that the so-called new evangelical agenda is simply the latter-day Graham agenda.

Graham got to where he got because, over his six decades in American public life, he became more adept at slipping punches than Muhammad Ali in his prime. Many were thrown, from left, right, and center, but Billy danced away from most to become the best known Protestant evangelist and the most iconic American religious leader of all time. How did he do it? In part by force of personality, in part by having perfect pitch for what appealed to his vast middle-class, moderately conservative white Protestant followers, in part by sticking to his message of getting people to decide for Christ, in part by a shrewd determination never to let himself get boxed into an ideological corner.

By comparison with Graham, Warren is a softie—too eager to be loved, too willing to let his opponents spook him. And he’s paying a price for it. On Proposition 8, he was so much a non-presence among the pro-initiative forces that AP reporters planned a “Where’s Rick?” story. But then, at the 11th hour (on a Friday, to his flock), he allowed himself to publicly support the thing. For his pains, he’s been pilloried on the left as just another Dobson. Graham, it’s safe to say, would never have succumbed. Just as he never presumed to speculate on the final fate of the earnest non-Christian. Always, he kept his eye on the main chance. By contrast, Warren wants to have his cake and eat it too.

Over at Religion in American History a few days a ago, Matt Sutton was inspired by the Newsweek brouhaha to put up a post calling out evangelicals for taking the hard line on gay marriage while being pretty squishy (these days) on divorce. Matt's point is that if evangelicals are going to to nix the former on biblical grounds, they had better do the same with the latter. (Jesus and Paul turn thumbs down on divorce except in a couple of specific cases.) The post has elicited a lively exchange, thanks to a defense of current evangelical marriage hermeneutics and politics by an anonymous commenter. What's comes through is 1) how insubstantial the moral argument against divorce is; and 2) how much the argument against same-sex marriage rests on its implicit sanctioning of proscribed sexual acts. Anyway, the exchange is worth checking out.