Recently in Evangelicals Category

With the Gingrich Bubble frothing away and the Iowa caucuses just around the corner, TPM asks if the all-important evangelical voting bloc (like, half of all GOP caucus-goers) will move into Newt's camp.

The Des Moines Register's Jennifer Jacobs has done her interviews and thinks it's split. A mysterious group called Iowans for Christian Leaders in Government has released a letter whomping on Christian leader in government wannabe Bob Vander Plaats for allegedly supporting Gingrich. Meanwhile, Doctor Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention has written an open Dear Newt letter urging the Thrice Married One to give a big speech to persuade evangelical women that he has cured his cheatin' heart.

On the basis of 200 informal SBC focus groups, Land thinks Gingrich has an evangelical gender problem. The latest Insider Advantage Iowa poll suggests otherwise; Newt's got three Republican women supporting him for every two Republican men. Then there's the abortion issue, on which the Gingrichian record is just about as squishy as Mitt Romney's. Will evangelicals plump for the insufficiently pro-life Mormon or the insufficiently pro-life serial polygamist? Or a fresh new face from the back of the pack? It would be nice if the pollsters would put religious identity back into their polls and provide a gender cross tab. Enquiring minds want to know.

If I were on Team Romney, I'd be fairly heartened by the latest Pew survey on religion and politics. It's true that white evangelicals are disproportionately less likely to prefer our guy, but not by a very large margin--17 percent of them as opposed to 23 percent of the GOP primary electorate as a whole. Put another way, if white evangelicals preferred him at the same rate as mainline Protestants and white Catholics--the two other major GOP religious groupings--he'd be polling at no higher than 26 percent.

In the entire field, the evangelical vote is sufficiently dispersed that Herman Cain, with the plurality, garners only 26 percent and Newt Gingrich only 19. Compare that to, say, the 2008 South Carolina primary, which John McCain won with 33 percent of the vote, just ahead of Mike Huckabee's 30 percent. Evangelicals, constituting 60 percent of the vote, went 43 percent for Huckabee, 27 percent for McCain, and only 11 percent for Romney, who finished a poor fourth overall. Or consider the Tennessee primary, which Huckabee captured with 34 percent of the vote, followed by McCain at 32 percent and Romney at 24 percent. Evangelicals, constituting 73 percent of voters, went 43 percent for Huckabee, 27 percent for McCain, and 20 percent for Romney.

Using regression analysis, John Green and I were able to show that Romney's weakness among evangelical voters cost him the GOP nomination in 2008. This time around, he seems to be doing a much better job of keeping the "evangelical gap" with his competitors down. And based on the Pew numbers, I'd say the chances of his continuing to do so are pretty good.

As of the second week in November, evangelicals as a whole (not just Republicans) actually said they preferred Romney to President Obama by a few points more than they preferred Gingrich, Cain, or Perry to the president. And more of them (46 percent) had a favorable view of Romney than of either Cain (45 percent) or Perry (42 percent). The only candidate who beat him out on favorability was Gingrich, and by just four points. So if Romney can get his aggregate number out of the mid-20s, the likelihood is that it will include a sufficient number of evangelicals to enable him to capture the nomination.

Call it the Mere Christian Marriage Creed (2MC). C.S. Lewis' contention that in a non-Christian society Christians should not seek to impose their anti-divorce ideology on those who do not share it is attracting the attention of some thoughtful conservative evangelicals. They recognize that Americans are moving to accept same-sex marriage, and believe that the responsibility of the church--their church--is to clearly differentiate its conception of marriage from that of civil society.

I've received a number of comments suggesting that I have been too bold in claiming that Lewis would have taken the same approach to same-sex marriage--and of course it's impossible to know with certainty what his view would have been. But Darlene Parsons (Dee) of Wartburg Watch and Wade Burleson, sometime president of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, recognize that the principle is the same for SSM as it was for divorce: When the social consensus moves away from something a religion teaches, the religion should focus on keeping its own house in order rather than trying to keep the rest of society in line. That's the position Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, took last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It is part and parcel of his denunciation of homophobia from the pulpit at last month's SBC convention, for which he has caught considerable flak.

The Christian argument against 2MC was made long ago by J.R.R. Tolkien in the draft of a letter he wrote but never sent to Lewis, and I'm grateful to commenter Marta for calling my attention to it (and transcribing it--see the whole text after the jump).

If Christian marriage were in the last analysis 'unnatural' (of the same type as say the prohibition of flesh-meat in certain monastic rules) it could only be imposed on a special 'chastity-order' of the Church, not on the universal Church. No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians.

The great medievalist and fantasy writer was a devout Catholic, and here he is appealing to Catholic natural law doctrine: If a moral teaching of the church is determined to be dictated by natural law, then it applies to, and can legitimately be required of, everyone. Lewis, an Anglican, was taking a Protestant line. We should not be surprised that reconciling themselves to the legalization of SSM in American society should come more easily to heirs of the Reformation like Burleson and Mohler than to Catholic bishops. Built into Protestant DNA is the knowledge that the church is set apart from society at large, and that, when push comes to shove, it is the responsibility of Christian leaders to tend to their own flocks and let the great world spin on.

Update: Want to see how the Catholic apparat brings the hammer down on a Catholic intellectual who opts for 2MC? Check out Emily Stimpson's piece in the latest (July 17) Our Sunday Visitor. Complete with recantation.

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.