The religious right is down but not out - Thread

Interesting perspective from the Economist:
The religious right is down but not out
Nov 9th 2006, From The Economist print edition
A FORTNIGHT ago Ted Haggard was one of the religious right's brightest stars. He was the founder of a booming megachurch, the president of the 30m-strong National Association of Evangelicals and a leading campaigner against same-sex marriage. He was also a close friend and neighbour of James Dobson, the movement's capo di tutti capi, and an enthusiastic ally of George Bush. He liked to say that he and the president agreed on everything except which pickup truck to drive—Mr Haggard drives a Chevy while the president drives a Ford.
But what did he do when he was driving around in that Chevy pickup? On November 1st a male escort accused Mr Haggard of sundry sordid misdeeds—including paying him for sex on a regular basis and using methamphetamines. Mr Haggard produced a series of bizarre denials. He had bought meth but thrown it away. He had been in the market for a regular massage. But by the end of the week he came clean and stepped down. “There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all my adult life.”
Mr Haggard's fall is a symbol of bigger problems for the religious right. This election cycle was a dismal one for the so-called theocrats. Mr Dobson urged his flock to “take about five people with you and vote. It would be a sin not to.” But the turnout was a disappointment from the Republicans' point of view. Early opinion polls suggest that a third of white evangelicals voted for Democrats, many of them complaining about corruption. In 2004, only one in five chose the sinful party.
The result was a string of defeats. Rick Santorum, social conservatism's most prominent champion in the Senate, scraped only 41% of the vote in Pennsylvania. Kenneth Blackwell, a black social conservative, went down to a humiliating defeat in the Ohio governor's race. The religious right also lost three important ballot initiatives (see article). In all, a terrible night.
And all this has come on the heels of two dismal years for religious conservatives. Ralph Reed, the Wunderkind of the Christian Coalition, has been exposed as a huckster who was willing to exploit social conservatives in order to rig a gambling concession. The religious right's chosen vehicle of national redemption—the Republican Party—has been tarnished as the party of Mark Foley and Jack Abramoff. And after six years of Republican rule, millions of fetuses are still aborted, and gay marriage has still not been nationally banned, though a majority of states now bar it.
The religious right's biggest problem, however, is not scandal: it is the movement's addiction to overreach. The most disastrous example of this was the Terri Schiavo affair—the case of a severely brain-damaged woman who was caught in a battle between her husband, who wanted to remove her feeding tube, and her parents, who wanted it left in place. The religious right tried to use the full might of Washington to keep Mrs Schiavo “alive”. And a large majority of the general public—including 72% of Republicans in one poll—responded with a big boo.
This overreach has given the Democratic Party a chance to make inroads into the evangelical vote. Bob Casey won the Pennsylvania Senate seat from Mr Santorum, in part, because he stressed his pro-life credentials. The man who beat Mr Blackwell for the governorship of Ohio, Ted Strickland, is an ordained minister. Meanwhile, some conservatives are voicing their unhappiness. Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader and devout Christian, says that “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies”. He worries that they are driving away moderate business-friendly conservatives, and that they are fixating on issues, such as school prayer, that have no political traction. “Being a Christian”, says Mr Armey, “is no excuse for being stupid.”
Of course, a couple of bad years do not mean the end of an era. Christian conservatives have always been plagued by disasters and scandals. Two of the most popular preachers of the Reagan era—Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart—were both caught with their trousers down. The Moral Majority collapsed. The Christian Coalition has shrivelled. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have been putting their feet in their mouths for years. Libertarians and social conservatives have long had a tetchy relationship: Barry Goldwater once urged “every good Christian” to kick Mr Falwell “right in the ass”.
Trousers down, feet in mouths
The religious right still has two things going for it. One is the Democratic Party's inveterate hostility to religion. A fifth of Democratic votes in 2004 came from “seculars, atheists and agnostics”, and many leading Democrats are woefully ignorant when it comes to religious America. In “Tempting Faith”, David Kuo recounts his attempts to help leading Democrats increase their appeal to religious conservatives. Aides to Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, did not know what the Family Research Council or the National Association of Evangelicals were.
The movement, though damaged, has an uncanny ability to reinvent itself. Sam Brownback, a senator from Kansas, is a tireless crusader against the massacres in Darfur and sex-trafficking everywhere. Many evangelical organisations—including Mr Haggard's—have been trying to broaden their agenda to include global poverty and global warming.
But the lesson from the past two years—and from this Tuesday's results in particular—is that conservative Christians had better hurry up with the work of reinvention. Try shining the light a bit more on Mr Brownback and a bit less on the 70-year-old Mr Dobson. And try talking more about Darfur and less about “the homosexual agenda”. The religious right is very far from dead. But it does not need any more humiliations such as the one inflicted on Mr Santorum this week.