The Problem with Evangelicals

Larison asks why Evangelicals are being blamed for the GOP’s failures. They have been the least influential segment of the party in recent years, despite being numerous and reliable (or perhaps because of it, no?). He suggests it was because:

they were too wedded to the Bush administration and its failed record, and they were too dependent on reciting the trite slogans they heard on the radio and read in syndicated conservative columns.

Andrew Sullivan asks:

And why were they so trusting of Bush and unable to see his flaws, Daniel? You have to see the link between the fundamentalist psyche and the suspension of critical judgment in the Republican party for the past eight years. A non-born-again president would never have been allowed to get away with it.

Larison is right that they’re reliable and not influential. That’s what happens to political groups who join coalitions for negative reasons rather than any positive support for their platform or ideology. They don’t vote for Republicans; they vote against Democrats. Republicans only attract the religoius conservative vote to the extent that Democrats are portrayed as—and, more important, to the extent that they actually willingly play the part of—the Boogeyman on the Left in the culture wars (e.g. the “Party of Death” who will sacrifice your First Amendment religious liberties on the altar of enforced acceptance of gay marriage). There’s a reason that white, married, Christian support for the Republicans began to surge in the late ’60s and ’70s, after all. That era saw the heating up, especially with Roe v. Wade, of the culture wars. (H/T Andrew for the study that shows this).

In other words, Evangelicals clung to Bush more out of fear that the other side wanted to make war with their most cherished beliefs. Obama got this, and so he and the Democratic Party put on a less threatening face to these voters, which was why they chipped away at Evangelical support for the GOP in November (aside from the fact that Evangelical support for Bush had been declining even before 2006; so much for “blindness”).

Part of what may be misdirecting Andrew’s ire in this case is that he’s overestimating Evangelical support for the specifically foreign policy elements of the Bush era. “Blame the Evangelicals” was a game many engaged in once the war began to turn sour, yet Evangelical support before the war (I remember it being at about 77 percent) wasn’t all that much greater than overall support for the war. I remember this prediction James Kurth made all the way back in 2005 ($ubscription required for full article, sadly):

The Evangelicals supported the Bush democratization project because it was a Bush project, and they were already committed to his policy (or more accurately his rhetoric) on cultural and social issues. Conversely, some human rights proponents supported the Bush democratization project because it was a democratization project. They opposed Bush on just about every other policy, especially those involving cultural and social issues. Indeed, the human rights proponents have despised the Evangelicals, and the result has been an unstable coalition of support for the Bush foreign policy.

For the most part, Evangelical Protestants have not considered American foreign policy to be one of their priority political issues. They were utterly indifferent to U.S. democratization efforts under the Clinton Administration. If democratization should come about in a foreign country, Evangelicals will be pleased, all the more so because it might open up the country to missionary activity. (In this respect, China now appears to be an especially promising field for evangelization.) But Evangelicals think that such openings will come about through God’s work and not through their own political actions. Certainly, Evangelical Protestants who take their Bible seriously know that Jesus Christ is the light of the world and that to see America as this light is a form of idolatry and heresy.

Still, as the foreign policy of the Bush Administration draws closer to a debacle, someone will have to take the blame. This will particularly be the case in the election campaigns of 2006 and 2008. Democrats and liberals will attack Republicans and conservatives. The latter two groups, in turn, will have a strong incentive to distance themselves from the Bush presidency and from the Evangelical Protestants, “the religious Right” who so strongly and so carelessly supported Bush when he led America into a reckless adventure in the Middle East. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and secular conservatives will agree that the Evangelicals are to blame. The real architects of the Bush foreign policy will go on to other things and will be forgotten, if not forgiven, because they do not threaten Democrats and liberals on the cultural and social issues that mean so much to them. The Evangelicals do threaten the liberals on domestic issues, however, and the opportunity to marginalize them by blaming them for a foreign policy debacle will be irresistible.

Which is kinda what’s going on in this case, no? So there’s really no need to engage in any psychoanalytic talk about some sort of “fundamentalist psyche.”

As for the GOP’s Evangelical problem, which Larison and Sullivan (quoting another poster) call the “oogedy boogedy” problem, I submit to you that it’s just that: a pre-rational, “ick factor” distaste of Bible thumpers by Republican faux-elitists. Republicans can indulge in that “ick factor” animus only at the peril of becoming the permanent minority party.