There may not be much Good News in the pews for the GOP. The tawdry parable of Mark Foley is only one reason. Maturing from rebels to political insiders, evangelicals are divided on tactics and agendas, and beginning to doubt whether it is possible to ennoble society, let alone save souls, through Christian political activism.
Foley put new cracks in the notion of the GOP as a vessel of family virtue. “It doesn’t make you mad so much as it sickens you,” said Northland’s pastor, Joel C. Hunter. Among evangelicals, moral revulsion will yield electoral consequences: fewer and less eager volunteers, a lower turnout, especially if the hunkered-down House leadership is found to be covering up. “The ones who are kind of close to the margins anyhow are more likely just to say, ‘I don’t even want to go there’,” he said. “And of course they’re the ones who could make the difference.”
So the polls show. A Pew Foundation survey found an 8-percentage-point drop in Republican preference among “frequent churchgoers.”
Long before the Foley e-mails surfaced, the gears were grinding in the faith-based machine that Ronald Reagan inspired and Karl Rove perfected. It has been 30 years since evangelical, “Bible-believing” Christians flocked into politics. Figures such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Charles Colson of the Prison Fellowship have enormous clout within the GOP; Rove is a phone pal of both. But a younger crop of grass-roots activists views the eldersof the cultural right as accommodationists who have failed to press a social agenda aggressively, and who now balk at calling for the ouster of Speaker Denny Hastert. “They need to wake up!” said Jamie Johnson, a religious broadcaster in Iowa. “Heads have to roll! The older generation is satisfied with a seat at the table. We want to build a whole new table.”
Some evangelicals want to broaden the movement’s agenda–in ways that don’t necessarily help the GOP cause. They still care about abortion and traditional marriage, of course, but are equally concerned about immigration (they want strict limits), federal spending (they view it as wildly out of control) and the war in Iraq (about which they are increasingly ambivalent). “We don’t want to deal with ‘hot button’issues only,” said Hunter, who recently took command of the Christian Coalition, which, though enfeebled, still claims a mailing list of 2.5 million.
A certain weariness has set in as evangelicals realize that politics is, by nature, beyond redemption. I met one such skeptic at the First Baptist Church of Orlando–a colossal Wal-Mart of spiritual endeavor near an exit ramp of I-4. “I’m not sure that you can send anyone to Washington who won’t be corrupted there,” said Gregg Chapman, a 38-year-old husband, father and manager at Disney. “You can’t cure what’s wrong with the world until you cure what is wrong in here,” he said, pointing to his chest. That was his Good News, but not the Word the Republicans wanted to hear.
