Evangelicals At Heart

When and where I grew up, “damnyankee” was one word. In much the same manner, in many environs in our current time “religious” has become “religiousright.” This leads me to another suggestion to my friends (and others) on the left: you’ll never connect with voters who care about “values” as long as you continue to regard every religous person as a right-winger.

In short, it would be helpful if Democrats and their press could introduce some, well, discrimination into their discussions of religion and politics. Doughty liberals of old (doughty: “Marked by stouthearted courage; brave”) were strong and confidant enough to engage in common cause with religious movements (think of the anti-slavery and various anti-war movements), but today’s Dowdy liberals (followers of the New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd, who fears Protestants the way Protestants formerly feared Catholics) can’t drive by a few cars in a church parking lot without seeing the tell-tale signs of an imminent theocratic coup.

Just as all religion has melded into the “religiousright,” virtually every churchgoer, or at least every voting churchgoer, has suddenly become an “Evangelical,” a movement that the libs have seemingly now expanded to include the 52% of Catholics who voted for Bush. Now I know it’s too much to expect the press to make fine theological or even denominational distinctions between, say, evangelicals and pentecostals, but the brush most of the press paints with has now become so broad that it illuminates nothing, except reflected press bias. It’s as though all churchgoers look alike.

A quick Google search turned up 597 Washington Post articles in the past year that mention “evangelicals.” I didn’t read them all, but I eyeballed the cites and didn’t see one that appeared to define evangelical. The term seems to have become synonymous with, well, religiousright.

For example, the title of an article in today’s Washington Post by Alan Cooperman and Thomas B. Edsall (most of whose work I deeply respect) proclaims that “Evangelicals Say They Led Charge For the GOP.” The “untold story” of the 2004 election, they write, “is that evangelical Christian groups were often more aggressive and sometimes better organized on the ground than the Bush campaign.” They conducted “dozens of interviews” and learned from “grass-roots activists” that Karl Rove had set “a clear goal”:

To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.

So, conservative Catholics, presumably because they are conservative, are now “evangelical”? I suspect that would be news to their Church. In an article last September Cooperman wrote of President Bush addressing an “audience of 2,500 conservative Catholics” at a Knights of Columbus convention in Houston. How does Cooperman know that all 2500 were conservative, from an exit poll? Are all Knights of Columbus conservative? Were invitations to attend the President’s address limited to conservative convention attendees? Does Cooperman assumet that only conservatives would atttend the president’s address?

The press’s indiscriminate use of the term “evangelical” reminds me of the time (I swear: this really happened) the segregationist Miss. governor Ross Barnett once spoke to a Jewish congregation in Jackson, and received a hearty round of applause. Beaming, he told the audience that they were “mighty fine Christians,” which caused them to laugh and applaud even louder. The rabbi then whispered into Barnett’s ear that this was the first time his congreation had ever been described as fine Christians. Barnett, seeming to get it, then added: “Oh well, I’m sure you’re all fine Christians at heart.”

It has become so clear that Bush virtually owes his re-election to the “evangelical” vote that the numbers don’t seem to matter. Thus Cooperman and Edsall can write, in this same article, that

Whether evangelical turnout rose nationally this year, and by how much, is unclear. Without question, however, Bush’s conservative Christian base was essential to his victory.

Bush voters, whether Catholic, high or low church Protestant, or perhaps even Jewish, are all evangelicals at heart.