I was on a Council on Foreign Relations conference call Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country. The call was on the record; when it’s available I’ll provide a link for those of you who want to listen to it. The subject was timely: what’s happening with evangelicals in politics this year.
In 2006 I published an article in Foreign Affairs that looked at this topic; “God’s Country?” was a quick and dirty survey of the politics of Protestant religion in the United States. It made the point that the evangelicals of today are not the same as the fundamentalists of yore and that the foreign policy world should take the opportunity to engage with evangelicals: they are a vital constituency who will be shaping American public opinion on foreign affairs for a long time to come and a combination of mission, humanitarian and security issues are drawing evangelicals more closely into the foreign policy debate.
In Friday’s call I argued that the core thesis of the article — that evangelicals are emerging as the leading force in American religion — remains valid. In fact, while the growth rate of some evangelical churches has slowed, the continuing decline of mainline Protestantism and the developing crisis in American Catholicism are making evangelicals more salient than ever.
This much, I think, is relatively uncontroversial (though if I’m wrong there will certainly be plenty of comments posted to show me up!). What I went on to say sounded equally uncontroversial to me, but some of the call participants sounded nonplussed. It seems to me that in 2008, evangelicals were relatively quiescent. Then-Senator Obama took a number of steps to reach out to the evangelical audience, including making his first joint appearance with Senator McCain be at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. This paid off: despite some qualms about his association with the effervescent and theologically adventurous Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama improved on Senator Kerry’s share of the evangelical vote. There were other reasons why the evangelical vote did not help the Republicans as much as it sometimes does in 2008. Many evangelicals were, I think, disheartened by the performance of the Bush administration, and Senator McCain is not a candidate who appeals to this audience.
But 2010 looks very different to me. Evangelicals are likely to play a larger role in this fall’s midterms than they did in the 2008 general election, and that role will redound in most places to the benefit of Republican candidates. Evangelicals are more energized than they were in 2008 and their energy is perhaps a bit more conservative now than it was then.
This is the part that concerned some of the call participants. There’s a kind of cottage industry that involves looking for the emergence of a politically centrist or even liberal evangelical movement in the United States. Jim Wallis has been beating this drum for a long time, and from time to time there are press reports about a new generation of evangelicals that is going to be more politically moderate than the last one. There’s nothing inherently improbable about politically liberal evangelicals; William Jennings Bryan was well to the left of most Democrats today on many economic issues (though not on racial ones!) and many American evangelicals considered him the leading voice of the movement from 1896 to his death following the Scopes trial in Tennessee. Nineteenth-century evangelicals were found on the cutting edge of movements for social change ranging from abolition to prohibition to female suffrage, and mission-minded evangelicals played a significant role in the development of humanitarian and peace-oriented American foreign policy. Many African-American churches are far more orthodox than Reverend Wright, but are staunchly liberal on a range of economic issues.
But while there is no reason to think that in principle evangelicals couldn’t shift towards the center or even the left, I think that in the short term we are if anything moving the other way. The movement isn’t monolithic; like the population at large, evangelicals seem to be growing more tolerant of homosexuality (perhaps less so of gay marriage) and more hard-line on abortion. There is definitely an undercurrent of impatience with Israel among some, though I have yet to see any real sign of a change in evangelical feelings by and large.
Things could still change before November, but in general American opinion seems to have been moving toward the right in the last year, and evangelicals appear to be part of this trend and perhaps a leading contributor to it. Part of this is due to shifts in the perception of President Obama. During the 2008 campaign two quite different images of the candidate emerged: the polarizing figure who dismissed those clinging to the their God and their guns and who associated with perceived extremists like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright — and the healing, sympathetic figure on the stage at Saddleback. Those two contrasting images of the president are still visible today, but evangelicals seem increasingly focused on the first and more controversial aspect of the Obama phenomenon.
A look back at the history of evangelical political activism shows a pattern of increasing and diminishing involvement in politics. Organizations like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family come and go; liberal commentators frequently bemoan the seemingly inexorable rise of a new conservative Christian movement, only to hail the apparently permanent disappearance of the Christian right a few years later. We could all save ourelves a lot of trouble if we thought of evangelical political activism as a tidal sea; the tide goes in and the tide goes out, but the sea is neither about to dry up nor about to overrun the whole island.
The tide was out in 2008; it looks like it’s coming back in this year. American evangelicals tend to be populists in both religion and politics, and a number of conservative populist themes are in action this year. Fear of federal budget deficits, dislike of a strong central government and ‘creeping socialism’, the sense that the nation is beleaguered at home and abroad while the authorities in Washington are asleep at the wheel: these and similar themes are exactly the kind to bring evangelicals and more libertarian conservatives together in a ‘popular front’ movement. The current tensions between the United States and Israel, combined with strong public suspicion of Iran, could also work to attach evangelical voters to a broad conservative coalition this year.
One of the issues which showed some signs of splitting evangelicals in 2006 and 2008 — climate change — has lost some of its appeal on the right. The increased association of the movement with the United Nations was a mistake from the standpoint of involving American evangelicals in its support. “Global governance” remains a suspicious concept, and the combination of the ‘climategate’ and ‘glaciergate’ scandals — the hacked emails of climate scientists and a small but not insignificant number of errors and exaggerations in the IPCC report — triggered some deeply entrenched cultural concepts in the evangelical mind. The suspicion of a global establishment with high moral pretensions that uses forged evidence to support its universal pretensions goes back to the Reformation when this was exactly how the early Protestants saw the Church of Rome. Transferred first into British and then into American politics and popular culture, this fear of a conspiratorial global elite bent on destroying American freedom and building a global state recurs over and over in our history. The climate change movement unwittingly activated some powerful templates in American popular culture and religion; climate policy will have to be disentangled from this unfortunate web of associations before large numbers of evangelicals are ready to jump into the fray.
The link which could draw many evangelicals closer to centrist and even liberal foreign policy ideas is Wilsonianism: the desire to use American power to make this a better world. The problem, again, is globalism. Liberal internationalists by and large are hoping to build a liberal and Wilsonian world order on the basis of international institutions and through the expansion of the rule of law in international relations. Evangelicals would like to see a more peaceful world, but they are less enthusiastic about the value of international institutions, especially global ones. American religion is deeply sectarian; evangelicals in particular tend to believe that large institutions are more easily corrupted than ones that are smaller and closer to the grassroots. In both politics and religion, as much power as possible should stay as close to the people as possible. Liberal Wilsonians interested in forging coalitions with evangelicals need to ask themselves whether some or all of their international policy agenda can be disaggregated from the ambition of building a kind of global state-in-waiting. (I myself think this is a smaller sacrifice than it looks; global institutionalism is going to look more and more like a dead end as the developing world continues to become more assertive and world politics continues to move away from European cultural norms.)
As evangelical intellectuals continue to make their way into elite institutions and professions, we are likely to continue hearing more calls for a new political profile for evangelicals, and there will be more people looking forward to the day when an ‘enlightened evangelicalism’ makes itself felt in American politics. That day may very well come, but I don’t expect it in 2010. Many people who talk about the new evangelicals use words like ’emerging’ to describe these movements. In politics, where everything revolves around the now, ’emerging’ is just a synonym for ‘small’. For this election cycle at least, it seems likely that the evangelical action will be on the right.
The long term trends in American religion are less clear. It looks as if American society is becoming more polarized; a growing number of Americans don’t identify with any religion, but the much larger number who do seem to keep choosing ‘hot religion’ over the more decorous varieties. Catholics either drift away from the Church or intensify their theological commitment; Protestants continue to desert the mainline churches with some attracted to evangelical and Pentecostal religion and some moving away from Christianity altogether. Smaller religious groups like Muslims, Hindus and Jews may be going through a similar process. As theologically conservative African American, Latino and Asian-American congregations and denominations continue to grow and to interact with white evangelicals more than in the past, we will probably see shifts in evangelical politics — though it is much too soon to tell what these will be. As the African American and Latino middle class continues to grow, will we see a shift to the right as their economic interests and their views of some social issues pull them away from mainstream Democratic positions? Or will an increased solidarity with minority Christians in the United States (and the growing numbers of Christians in the global south) pull white evangelicals toward greater support for government action to relieve economic distress? Will African Americans and white southerners move away from conservative theological ideas as the old racial and regional identities become less salient in the 21st century?
We will understand these matters better by and by; for now it looks as if a lot of evangelicals will be turning out to vote in 2010, and most of those who do will be voting on the right.