Last week, Faith in Public Life and Third Way released a study, Come, Let us Reason Together (PDF). The study has been the subject of a fairly intense back-and-forth debate with pastordan at Street Prophets, mostly about the partisan implications of the study, and what we (as progressives, or as Democrats, take your pick) should do about it.
One of the most interesting findings of the report are that evangelicals can be decomposed, politically, into three groups: progressive (about one-fifth of evangelicals), moderate (one-third), and conservative/traditionalist (one-half). Despite these ideological monikers, the group is every bit as conservative in voting behaviors as we've otherwise heard: 88% of conservative evangelicals, 64% of centrists, and 48% of progressive evangelicals voted for Bush. By contrast, 43% of self-described moderates, and 14% of self-described liberals, voted for Bush in 2004, according to CNN's 2004 exit polls. It's not their voting habits, but their positions on cultural and economic issues which make some evangelicals "progressive" and "moderate", according to Third Way.
Now, this may or may not be a political opportunity for Democrats. The 2006 exit poll results, in which 74% of evangelicals voted for Congressional Republicans (compared to 78% support for Bush in 2004) certainly don't suggest as much: in a Democratic wave election, evangelicals are still heavily pro-Republican. But the evangelical world is changing slowly, and it's at least theoretically possible that there may be some long-term potential in this group.
The cause of that slow change interests me much more than the effects of the change, revealed in voting patterns and poll responses. Why are evangelicals suddenly beginning to speak out against the war, for the environment, and for the poor? What is going on, in the Sunday sermons and the small group ministries of evangelical churches, which is producing this shift?
There are a couple of different ways to understand this shift, and they parallel the way I understand the political power of the evangelical movement generally. One model supposes that the religious movement is largely apolitical internally, and that its interaction with the political world is driven through a number of religio-political leaders who drive the political efforts of the movement at a number of levels. These leaders include, most notoriously, folks like James Dobson at the highest level, some political pastors at a more localized level, and a mostly unnoticed group of politicized lay leaders within the churches, who are active both in church and political life. Some of the accounts in Applebee's America certainly seem to suggest that this model is correct, although those accounts are purely anecdotal.
Another model supposes that the theological underpinnings of the evangelical world are changing, and that those theological changes are producing parallel political changes. This model would predict that more and more evangelical pastors are focusing on the social justice aspects of the Gospels, for example, or that evangelical churchgoers are more and more curious about those portions of the Bibles (regardless of the messages coming from the pulpit.) Some aspects of the political shift in the evangelical world seem consistent with this model - particularly the recent popularity of "creation care", an evangelical theology of environmental responsibility. It appears that creation care is itself a response to heightened environmental awareness in the general public, but the concept nevertheless seems to be theological first, and political only in after-effects.
The difference between these two models is profound, and affects the actions of Democratic candidates going forward in very different ways. If the evangelical movement is mostly apolitical internally, and its political efforts are affected by key players who have a foot in the political world, then Democrats can only hope to make major headway in winning evangelical votes by winning support from those key players, or at least neutralizing their impact within the evangelical world. On the other hand, if the political changes are the by-product of underlying theological change, then winning evangelical votes may be as simple as not insulting evangelicals directly, and doing some broad-based outreach around issues of mutual consent, like global warming and economic justice.
But beyond vote-getting, the progressive movement should be concerned with these two very different models for another reason: social change. As both a political and a cultural movement, we should be concerned not just with winning elections, but also with changing our larger cultural environment. Our movement is strongest, and, we believe, our country is strongest, when more and more people subscribe to a "we're all in this together" worldview, to borrow Paul Waldman's formulation. If the first model is correct, and we are gaining a few evangelical supporters here and there because of rifts within the political leadership of the evangelical movement, then the long-term prospects for progressive social change are weak - or, at any rate, progressive social change isn't served by the evangelical movement at all. If the second model is correct, then there is some hope for long-term progressive social change through the evangelical movement.
I wish there was a bit more data on this kind of thing, but there just isn't. Most of the data we have about the political nature of the evangelical movement addresses things like voting behavior and issue positions, not the causes of that change. That's somewhat understandable, because voting behavior and issue positions are concrete quantities which can easily be measured in a variety of ways. Shifts in theology and the relative influence of various individuals within a movement are much harder to measure. Regardless, I think the progressive movement needs to start paying a lot more attention to the underlying causes of evangelical political attitudes; it is crucial to long-term social change.
