Is America beginning a new post-Religious Right era—and are religious conservatives, white evangelicals in particular, becoming more “moderate” (or even mirabile dictu, “liberal”)? Those seem to me the two central claims of EJ Dionne’s latest book, Souled Out , which I highly recommend—but with which I’m afraid I disagree.

What’s happening instead, in my view, is the following:
 
First, political conservatives across-the-board are on the defensive--and retrenching--nowadays. The reasons for this have primarily to do with the “big issues” of public life—their mishandling of the war and the economy, as well as corruption (Abramoff, Delay) and incompetence (FEMA, Rumsfeld)—not religion. It has also produced some recent moments that suggest that flying saucers have indeed landed in Roswell: Karl Rove offering his unsolicited advice to Barack Obama on how to win; Newt Gingrich calling for greater bipartisanship; Michael Gerson discovering Catholic social justice teachings.

The way the GOP so long insisted they were the only party of and for “the religious” (using their definition of "religious") does have some part to play, particularly because President Bush has been so belligerent about its place in his life and so reckless about its role in his decision-making. Whatever weight its is, it’s fairly clear that the Bush presidency’s failure—measured by approval ratings consistently below 30% nowadays—has clearly helped ruin the long-runnning popular Mainstream Press narrative about “the great size and rising power of evangelical conservatives” and of an enormous, unified “religious right” more generally.

Second, the best-known media-based Christian Right groups of the 1980s and 1990s—the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Promisekeepers, Family Research Council, etc.—are either gone, or vastly reduced in size and influence. From Carter through Clinton, they parlayed themselves from a small base known through their cable TV shows, through their noisy presence in Washington (and for a time state and local politics) into what Washington politicians and press told themselves (and then the rest of us) was The Leadership and The Voice of a huge, alienated, and very angry “Religious America.”

Third, in retrospect, these TV Christian Rightists clearly were self-promoters of a religious minority, than a majority. They moreover were less leaders of that minority than surfers on an authentic wave—not of a broad, national “new, conservative, religious” America but of an old and well-established minority bloc of conservative voters. Those voters were mainly white Southern evangelicals who for a century had voted Democratic because Abe Lincoln was a Republican--and who became Republican only because Martin Luther King and LBJ led non-Southern Democrats (and a few now-extinct moderate Republicans) to desegregate the Old Confederacy forty years ago. The Southern evangelicals are such a distinct minority among a broader national minority of religious conservatives, however, that conservative Catholics, Mainline Protestants, and Jews never joined the Moral Majority or Christian Coalition—even when they shared ideology and voting behavior on some issues—which contributed to the groups’ demise.

The TV Christians, however--despite their ultimate institutional failure (though not personal failure: Falwell and Robertson became multimillionaires)---did fabricate three great falsehoods that we are still debating today:

1)       That Evangelicals Protestants are a near-majority of the country, and in concert with conservative Catholics and Jews, are indeed a majority, albeit now uncertain and confused about how best to exercise their majority rights;

2)       That an anti-religious minority—“secular humanists” or just “liberals” the preferred epithets—has for too long controlled most elite institutions (including the Democratic Party, the federal courts, the universities, and the mainstream press)--and that the SHs have been forcing their agenda on the majority;

3)       That the Republican Party would—if enough religious conservatives voted for it—save America from the secular humanists.

In fact, white evangelical Protestants have never come close to being an American majority. For over half a century in fact they’ve made up only a quarter of the US population—with over three-quarters of them living in in just two regions, the South and Midwest . The rest of the often-cited “forty percent” of Americans who are“born-again” are African-Americans (or a growing minority of Hispanics) who are evangelicals and generally Democrats—and in many cases are furious with the white TV Christian crowd, despite a shared faith.

The other important feature about this noisy conservative white evangelical minority is that—contrary to their own claims, and the Mainstream Press’s careless repetition—they’ve never been a "fast-growing" percentage of the US population. Their power, rather, derived from the fact that they switched parties, which gave Republicans a big bloc of new safe seats in Congress (and later state houses and legislatures). They felt neglected and abused by their Democratic first husband, and started fooling around with the rich Republican.  But now they're married to the GOP,  and they're surprised that the romance has gone away?

In fact, the enmity the TV Christians have generated among other Americans has produced an important and overlooked backlash. Pew polls find, for example, that just one religious group in America now expresses a "favorable" view of "the Christian conservative movement": white evangelical Protestants.

Most polls show that, rather than fostering greater religiosity, the rise of the Religious Right has produced an astounding consequence:  the fastest-growing “religious” group in America for the last decade has been the non-religious---millions of men and women, most of them raised in religious families who for one reason or other had stopped practicing their faiths. But thanks to the overreaching claims of the Religious Right, they’ve “come out” in opposition to its narrowness and intolerance by rejecting any relationship with organized faith whatsoever. If the non-religious keep growing at current rates, the polls indicate, they will actually outnumber white evangelicals within the next five to ten years.

In the midst of this backlash against faith, however, a separate new narrative—one also opposed to this Religious Right--has appeared; its goal, however, is to “rescue” American religion from the hands of its most extreme practitioners. This is the narrative in which EJ has played a prominent role for nearly a decade as head of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, as have Jim Wallis, Alan Wolfe, Ron Sider, Amy Sullivan, and many other good friends. (Disclosure: I’ve played a modest supporting role, both in my writing and teaching on religion and politics at Harvard, and in my work with varioius liberal Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and secular civil liberties groups.)

This new counter-narrative has been making two big points. The first is that “American religion” encompasses far more than conservative evangelicals or conservative political worldview more generally.   The second is that even among conservative evangelicals there’s a Great Awakening underway—and it’s generating a growing support for moderate, even liberal, positions on a host of issues.

All this is in part an attempt to blunt the frankly inane and willfully ignorant idea—popularized by so-called New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and my old friend Chris Hitchens—that all religion is always fundamentally conservative and anti-rational. (Harris, in particular, as he berates religious progressives for "accomodating" the existence of religious reactionaries, reminds me of Senator McCarthy. I suspect he has a list, with Falwell’s name followed by Niebuhr’s, that to him proves their association.)

I must admit that I find myself, on one level, embarrassed to be arguing that religion isn’t consistently reactionary and anti-rational simply because the American historical record is so clear why both the Religious Right and New Atheists are wrong. Think of abolition, suffrage, and the labor movements in the 19th century (all of them deeply framed by and infused with religion: try for example to hear “Amazing Grace” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as secular melodies). Or try to imagine the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s if Martin Luther King had been a professor instead of a preacher. (My own Mainline Protestantism taught me this tradition as gospel; when a secular friend once joked that I thought the Holy Trinity was “Father, Son, and Franklin Roosevelt,” I didn’t get what the joke was.)

My task as a Mainliner reminding fellow Mainliners of our progressive traditions is made easier by the fact that Mainline Protestantism in general has been supported and often led the way on a broad range of very non-Religious Right positions, dating back to the Social Gospel in the late 19th century and abolition before the Civil War.

At the height of the media’s preoccupation with Falwell and Robertson, my own Episcopal Church, for example, not only moved forward to ordain openly-gay clergy, but more recently has elected a woman as its presiding bishop--and she is now refocusing the denomination's considerable institutional energies on advancing the Millenium Development Goals to help lead a massive and immediate reduction in global poverty rather than letting the Religious Right continue to define abortion, homosexuality, stem cells, and Terry Schiavo as the “values” questions religious Americans are required to debate. “Enough already” seems to be the Mainliners’ new motto.

For EJ, a progressive Catholic, the struggle is somewhat different. He can proudly draw on 20th century Catholicism’s social justice teaching to emphasize why Catholics should focus on poverty rather than sex, gays, and abortion.  But since Vatican II, he also knows that the institutional church hasn’t been pulling hard in his direction. Conservative bishops want to deny communion to politicians who defend a woman’s right to choose; none has yet withheld the sacraments from a politician who won’t raise the minimum wage.

Conservative leaders blunting progressive theology isn't the only problem: the American Catholic Church is losing active members much faster than Mainline Protestants (who lost a quarter of their members in the 1960s and 1970s, but who’ve been generally stable or growing in the past fifteen years.) Three out of four Catholics went to Mass weekly in the 1950s; today fewer than a third go. In other words, there may officially be 60 million Catholics in America today , but 40 million aren’t practicing their faith. (And the empty pew problem is exacerbated by an empty pulpit: today there are just 4,000 Catholics men studying for the priesthood; forty years ago there were 40,000.)

For white evangelicals like Jim Wallis or Ron Sider or Brian McLaren who want their coreligionists to be less reactionary, the challenge, in my opinion, is even more daunting: Mainliners and Catholics in general tilt Democratic these days; white evangelicals vote Republican three-to-one, a ratio that’s been rising for the last 30 years. Wallis and the others claim to see a new Great Awakening underway--it's the title of Wallis's latest book--with a major shift in their ranks to a new progressivism. The Mainstream Press loves their story, and now points to examples like Richard Cizik and the NAE’s recognition of global warming, the “new evangelicalism” of Rick Warren, poll data that shows young evangelicals’ declining support for the GOP, etc.

But parse any of these claims carefully, and none looks much like a radical Great Awakening. Instead, they remind many of us who are old enough of the shift that white evangelicals went through in the 1950s, when an earlier generation of “new evangelicals” such as Billy Graham were thought to herald the death of an older conservative and often vitriolic fundamentalism, that had once been openly anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and unapologetically racist. But how progressive was Graham? Few today know about Graham’s silence in the 1960s on civil rights—he never publicly supported Martin Luther King, or condemned George Wallace or the violence in Selma or Montgomery; in the midst of the Vietnam War he went to Vietnam at LBJ's request, and came back to support LBJ's expansion of the war; he brought Richard Nixon to his revivals to speak before evangelicals (who disliked Republicans, but were coming to hate Democrats more)---and then of course on tape was caught sharing his anti-Semitic biases with Nixon in the White House.

While that was then and this is now, consider the current claims made for a kinder, gentler “compassionate evangelicalism” today. What, for example, exactly are these Great Awakeners ready to do about the problems of the environment and global poverty? Have Richard Cizik and the NAE been calling for government-mandated fuel efficiency standards or higher gasoline taxes or required production of hybrid vehicles? Has Rick Warren, who has “embraced” the problem of global poverty, told us how he’s going to solve it?

He has apparently decided how he's not going to solve it. Here’s Warren two weeks ago rebuking a conservative columnist who called Warren a “statist like Jim Wallis” (Wallis—because he actually votes for Democrats, is married to an Anglican priest, and was raised in a Northern evangelical denomination—is still treated like a leper by the most of his ostensibly “new evangelical” colleagues):

“Actually, I completely disagree with Jim Wallis’s big government approach to poverty," Warren wrote. "The answer is not aid, but trade, not subsidies but freer markets, not wealth redistribution but wealth creation. not the government but local congregations. Saddleback’s P.E.A.C.E. plan is the exact opposite of outdated and ineffective liberal social government programs that have failed.

"We believe the answer is the Church, not bigger government.

"People who have studied our program know it is the exact opposite of Jim Wallis’ program. I’d appreciate you making this distinction and correction."

Warren then adds  this:

"The great thing out of all of this is that I discovered the Von Mises website! Peter Drucker was my personal mentor for 20 years, right up to his death. Drucker introduced me to Hayek who obviously led me to Von Mises. Of course you know Von Mises said 'Human action is purposeful behavior.' I’d call that a purpose driven life!"

Frankly I’m hard-pressed to see what’s so “new” or “transformative” about this sort of evangelical talk, or why Rick Warren is being celebrated as a “new voice" among white evangelicals. I think it's terrific that, unlike Falwell and Robertson, he doesn’t blame gays, feminists, and the ACLU for 9/11 (although the McCain campaign is edging toward blaming the Democrats for "losing Iraq") and that he refrains from calling Islam, as Franklin Graham (Billy Graham's son and head of Samaritan's Purse) did, "a very wicked and evil religion." This is very good.   

But does Warren really believe that “the churches” rather than “the government” will, for example, come up with the $500 billion or so that will be eventually needed to rebuild New Orleans post-Katrina? Does he really plan to take his PEACE program to Africa—and cure poverty by using the same principles as the now utterly-discredited Washington Consensus, which the World Bank and IMF now admit was a disastrous failure that led to a "lost decade of development"?

Does Warren seriously believe that Saddleback or Habitat for Humanity rather than the FHA and Fannie Mae can build enough housing to shelter those in need? Does he honestly think that wealth redistribution is not an issue, now that America has the most unequal wealth and income distribution in the Western world or in its own modern history? And how precisely will more Wal-marts and Chinese imports make up for the export of high-wage, high-skill jobs from America ? (Ludwig von Mise and Friederick Hayek, whom Warren is praising here, were two of the most reactionary economists of the 20th century, heroes to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics. These are the policy mentors of the “new” evangelicals like Warren?)

Even the much-vaunted rise of young evangelicals’ disillusionment with the GOP—according to Pew’s recent polls—turns out to be anything but a sharp turn away from conservatism. Young evangelicals began the Bush years as stronger GOP supporters than their parents, according to Pew; all evangelicals have declined in their support of Bush—but consistently are much more supportive than the rest of the country; young evangelicals are in greater numbers telling pollsters that they’re independent that Republican---but almost none are moving to become Democrats or call themselves liberal. And most evangelicals, young and old, remain active supporters of the death penalty, opposed to abortion, and while more “concerned” about poverty, AIDs and the like than in the past, are remarkably unclear on what exactly should be done to solve those problems.

So, conclusion: in Souled Out, EJ Dionne has given us a book, tightly argued, well-researched, and skillfully writen—that is too optimistic, in my view, in its assessment of how America’s religious and political landscape is changing because it is too kind to the very men and women who for too long have listened to the wrong prophets, prayed the wrong prayers, and worshipped at the wrong altars.....

If we really want to practice our own faith as both serpents and doves, we mustn’t  overlook their errors too easily, given no sign that they're guarding against error in new forms. We mustn't excuse them--and the great damage they’ve done--by the soft bigotry of our low expectations.