Michele – Greetings from this corner as well. Great to meet you and great blog and greater heart behind the blog.
I agree with you that the religious right isn’t dead. That isn’t what I meant to communicate. What I am saying is that the leadership is changing. It is changing radically in some cases – Falwell’s and D. James Kennedy’s passing – and it is changing more subtly – the quiet but increasingly loud revolt against the self-appointed evangelical political leadership. That is the group that I am talking about, not the rank and file.
Dobson and Bauer and Land are shadows of their once-powerful selves. They have little power anymore to mobilize for any particular candidate. Yes they can convene. But there is a very important point to be made about the Values Voter Summit last weekend and the ‘Road to Victory’ conferences of the late-90s that the Christian Coalition put together. The Coalition events were jam packed with people who were part of a movement – a directed movement. They represented the hundreds of thousands of Coalition members that listened to Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson (in that order). That wasn’t the case last weekend.
The question now becomes who replaces the mullahs? Who directs this ‘religious right’? What are they going to say about the tension of faith and politics and about the need for Christians to speak truth to power and be beholden to no one party? That is a wide open question.