Is The Christian Right Losing Its Mojo?

A fascinating New York Times article, “The Evangelical Crackup,” argues that the Evangelical right is changing; Bush disillusionment and the passing away of the elders is making a new Evangelical right that will be more focused on social work and fighting poverty, and less on restricting reproductive rights and fighting the gay menace.

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.”

I don’t know. The article’s author, David Kirkpatrick, has apparently put years into learning about the Evangelical movement, and I hesitate to question his expertise. But even so, what’s going on right now could just be a temporary retrenching in the wake of the failed Bush presidency; a more successful right-wing presidency, next year or four years after that or four after that, could bring all the borderline evangelicals right back into the fold.

Reading his article reminded me of the many right-wingers who have confidently declared feminism to be dead, again and again and again and again, every five or ten years for as long as I can recall. And, for that matter, conservatives who just a few years ago were pontificating on why it is the Democrats would Never Win Elections Again. They were wrong, and I suspect lefties who confidently predict the death of the Christian right are wrong for the same basic reason: It’s easy to believe what we wish to be true. ((Since I wrote this paragraph, I came across this excellent post in the Revealer making the same argument about the Times article.))

Over at Orcinus, Sara Robinson argues that we are going to see two Evangelical futures; much of the base will peel away into the mainstream, as the Times article argues is already happening, but a new hard-core of radical right Christians will remain, focused on Muslims rather than Blacks, queers or Mexicans as the new symbol of Ultimate Evilhood. (Robinson argues that the younger generation of evangelicals simply lacks the ferocity of homophobia necessary to maintain lesbians and gays as the ultimate boogie monsters). I’m not totally persuaded by Robinson — for example, her belief that anti-migrant xenophobia won’t find much traction in the US seems very optimistic, and very unlike what’s going on in the country today — but her discussion is smart and damned interesting. (I’m not sure that right-wing Christians will get much out of it other than pissed off, however.)