Reports of the demise of the Religious Right have been greatly exaggerated

In last week's New York Times Magazine, the cover story was about "The Evangelical Crackup"--e.g. the collapse of the Religious Right. I decided to go ahead and read it, although I'm so weary about reading about the Religious Right and who they will or won't pick to support among the Republican candidates or what they did at their most recent "values voters" conference.

The mainstream press rarely, if ever, really understands the religious and cultural dynamics at work in regards to the Religious Right. The title of the article alone "The Evangelical Crackup" reveals an ignorance about the Religious Right which is comprised largely of evangelicals but also flat out fundamentalists. Furthermore, evangelicalism as a movement has always included a broad spectrum of belief on social issues that has never voted entirely as a bloc. How can evangelicals crack up if they were never a monolithic whole to begin with?

The article is interesting--chronicling the deaths and retirement of the movements founders (e.g. Falwell, D. James Kennedy, etc.), the disillusionment with the Iraq war, the rise of new leaders less concerned with politics like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels and the emergent church movement. However, given the amount of money out there in the hands of organizations that are a part of the Religious Right (think Focus on the Family) and the influence the movement has had upon culture (think whether or not you've ever heard of the Religious Left? or of Christians voting for anything other than Republican en masse?), I have to think that the real issues at work here are not the death of the Religious Right but rather a bad war policy and the lack of a viable Republican candidate that isn't either thrice-married or a Mormon. Elect Hilary Clinton and the movement that loves to hate her will be back in business better than before.



A better critique than my own can be found at The Revealer, a site about religious journalism run by Jeff Shartlett. His criticism of last week's NYT Magazine and assessment of the Religious Right's impact on culture seems right on to me.





Grace and Peace,





Chase