First of all, welcome, everyone, to our new mix-it-up, thrash-it-out politics blog.
Like most of you, I’m fascinated by what is going on among conservative Christians and politics these days. I am not, however, surprised by the rift between members in the pews and those in leadership. Two reasons.
Reason number one is that evangelicals, like most people, are never entirely consistent in what they say and what they do. When I lived in Texas (and worked for Rod’s current employer) I spent a lot of time with evangelicals–who were never as rigidly conservative as their leaders.
I remember feeling trepidation at having to deal with Southern Baptists, whom I assumed were contentious, ideological, political conservatives. Not so. “Oh, the Baptists,” one of my colleagues drawled, as she waved away my worries. “They’re just fuuuun.” She was right. They hugged, they sang, they smiled, they wore floral dresses, they asked about my kids, they frequently prayed for me.
It’s true that some of the evangelicals I met were heavily into politics and vocally condemned anyone they deemed liberal on social issues. But most of the time all they really wanted to do was pray for people with whom they disagreed, study the Bible, and raise their children.
They were, after all, committed Christians. So of course conservative Christians aren’t in lockstep with their supposed leadership. That’s because their leaders are their ministers, not Washington political operatives.
The second reason I’m not surprised by today’s rift is that we saw it before–on the religious left.

Thirty or 40 years ago, the left was basking in the glow of its well-deserved victories associated with Civil Rights. (Martin Luther King Jr. was, after all, a Baptist minister.) Liberal Christians then spent much of the 1970s fighting their way through women’s rights, primarily by ordaining female clergy in the mid-1970s.
Once Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973–and a theology of being pro-choice was then articulated by many mainline Protestant churches–the religious left’s power appeared unassailable.
By the time the early 1980s rolled around, the leadership of the religious left was promoting abortion rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and gun control, among other issues. If you attended their annual and biennial conventions in those days, you often felt like you were at a political rally rather than a spiritual event. There were multiple protests, news conferences, angry voting, and hurt feelings.
All that drama happened because the people in the pews were angry that their churches were led by people who were deeply involved in liberal political causes. In many cases, those causes were worthy. But they weren’t what church members across the nation wanted from their denominations. They wanted spiritual leadership.
We all know the rest of the story, of course. Liberal Christians lost members, partly because they were so busy fighting over gay rights and abortion that they stopped paying attention to the fact that their members were leaving–some of them to join conservative churches, but most of them to fall away from church-going altogether. The once-mighty National Council of Churches is now housed in a nearly-empty building. Mainline denominations have been laying off staff and closing churches for a couple decades.
I remember sitting at a social function at one point in the late 1980s and listening to a liberal Christian leader express contrition that he had viewed himself and other liberal Christians in the 1970s as “an arm of the Democratic Party.” (Sound familiar?)
Conservative Christian leaders may want to assess their political strategy. The thought of empty mega-churches must make them shudder.