With the passing of Rev. Jerry Falwell, there are quite a few people writing about his legacy and about state of political evangelicalism in America today. One example is from John Heilemann, writing in New York magazine. There are two points I want to discuss from Heilemann’s article. First, the rise of the megachurch and a different kind of political agenda:
The face of the modern Evangelical movement belongs instead to Rick Warren, the pastor of Orange County, California’s Saddleback Church (regular attendance: 20,000) and the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold more hardback copies (over 25 million) than any nonfiction book in history.
Now, on many social issues, Warren is just as conservative as Falwell. Abortion, bad. Gay marriage, bad. Etc. But whereas Falwell described aids as “the wrath of a just God against homosexuals,” Warren has donated millions of dollars to fight HIV in Africa. Whereas Falwell bemoaned the emerging strain of Evangelical environmentalism as “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus,” Warren declares, “The environment is a moral issue.” And regarding his pro-life stance, Warren says, “I’m just not rabid about it.”
Here is what I think about this. Falwell and Robertson were not authentic evangelicals, but charlatans that worked in tandem with powerful business interests to lead the lower white middle class into that arms of the GOP. They used every trick in the book. They played on regionalism and on race. They attacked the sexual mores of urbanites. They played on the elitism of coastal sophisticates. They turned taxation into a sin that pays for pornography and abortion and welfare mothers. And, above all, they told their flocks that their religion was under attack by liberal judges, the liberal media, and a secular Washington. Most of this was pure hooey…in some cases it was a total inversion of reality. The coastal, secular elites were precisely the Wall Street financiers that were working in tandem with Falwell and Robertson. Those tax breaks and that deregulation was serving the very people that were being sold as the enemy. On some issues, like gun control and federally mandated speed limits, the liberals were indeed badly out of touch with the values of the rural and southern lower white middle class. But on economic issues, the urban-based liberals’ policies dovetailed with their interests quite nicely.
What has happened over the last fifteen years is a more authentic evangelicalism has emerged, that doesn’t seem to narrowly follow the dictates of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. That is why we are seeing a spontaneous and genuine environmentalism emerging in the evangelical community. But, another thing has changed, and it is very important.
But unlike in Falwell’s heyday, the center of gravity of the Evangelical world is no longer the rural South; it’s the suburbs and exurbs of the West, Southwest, and Midwest. The movement is younger, better educated, and richer than it was at the height of the Moral Majority.
Another way of putting this is that the evangelical movement is growing among people in the middle and upper middle class. This means that more and more of them are actually in a financial position to benefit in reality from Republicans policies. They have capital gains, they have dividends, they pay a high marginal rate income tax, and they aspire to fall under the estate tax. This all came to a head in the 2004 election. The cultural and economic interests of evangelicals aligned with Bushism to a shocking degree.
[Bill] Galston, [a Brookings Institution fellow], and other experts believe that Bush’s trouncing of Kerry among Evangelicals (by 78 to 22 percent) almost certainly will prove a topping-out point for the GOP. “For a community as large and diverse as Evangelicals,” Pew Forum fellow John Green observes, “for somebody to get almost four-fifths of the vote, we’re pretty close to the theoretical maximum.”
Things moved back in our direction in 2006 and Democrats won seats in several exurban and suburban (and even some rural) districts. This was probably a blip, or an anomaly, of Bush’s failed policies…especially the handling of Katrina and the war in Iraq. There is still simply too much alignment between the economic and cultural interests of the GOP and the increasingly affluent evangelical movement for Democrats to compete in the exurbs.
Environmentalism presents one inroad. But economic populism does not. This is where I see a new split. Economic populism has increasing appeal wherever people are feeling the expanding economic disparity. That is not in the exurbs except among those suffering foreclosures. The Democrats need to go back after the rural voters, the hard-pressed suburban voters, and work on policies that align with their urban base.
One last thing. Rudy Guiliani.
The GOP’s agenda is still popular with people that pay high taxes and hold socially conservative views, but everywhere else their policies are bankrupt. Nowhere is this more clear than their Global War on Terror. But…
Certainly we need some kind of avant-garde theory to cope with the anomaly of Giuliani, whose social-liberal record and, ahem, colorful private life should long ago have consigned him to the Falwellian dustbin for discarded pagans. But because of the sense that the fight against terrorism is the predominant issue of the age, religious voters seem remarkably open to him.
The fight against terrorism has special appeal to the evangelical community, and it plays into some of the worst features of the movement: xenophobia, religious bigotry, millenialism, Biblical literalism, and absolutism. If properly goaded the movement could form the basis for a truly proto-fascist party. Their openness to Guiliani demonstrates that these ugly characteristics trump their social conservatism. And this is one of the main reasons why the GOP can ill afford to admit defeat in Iraq and bring our troops home. The GWOT must continue and it must an active battle or the issue falls off the table and the national discussion. Not only Guiliani would become an instant irrelevance, but dozens of other lawmakers, too.
For Democrats, the job is to end the war, go back after rural voters and pinched suburban voters, and push green policies in the exurbs.
You present some intesting premises in this diary. It sparked a couple of thoughts in me.
First, I have no problem with going after rural voters on economic issues. But I think the paradigm that says politicians should go after “voters” only, or even primarily, is a paradigm that needs to be challenged. At one point in time evangelicals were largely non-voters and that presented a big opportunity for the GOP. The Dems seem to just want to walk away from the people who have given up on voting and I think they are really missing the boat.
Secondly, exurban and middle class evangelicals may currently be serving the interests of the GOP, but it is a self-limiting group. The GOP policies are all about the destruction of the middle class and they have been limiting people’s ability to move into it for several decades. Unless things change substantially, there will be fewer middle class exurban voters of any religious persuasion.
Their openness to Guiliani demonstrates that these ugly characteristics trump their social conservatism.
And also their integral hypocracies. Apparently one must automatically be a hypocrite to “function” as a contemporary evangelical, at least ones of this mold. Nothing says hypocrite as viewing a variety of groups in negative ways. Yet they’ll show up for church on Sunday to further the cause of “all god’s children”.
My basic question is where the immigration debate fits into this, for both parties. Because it’s an issue that cleaves the GOP Wall Street base from its populist side, and it won’t take you more than five minutes listening to right-wing talk radio today to hear their sense of betrayal over this — the Bush administration choose cheap labor for businesses over the cultural/nativist concerns of its base.
But on our side, gosh: the unions aren’t happy about any deal that expands the labor pool, even if it extends citizenship (and humanity) to a lot of hard-working folks who’ve earned it.
I don’t know what the nexis of anti-immigration and evangelicalism is. There is definitely a relationship, but I don’t see it as a strong one. Islam is a different threat than cheap labor or Hispanic immigration.
One would think that the evangelicals might warm to the idea of expanding America’s promise to our Latin American neighbors.
I find it distressing that so many progressives repeat the meme that unions are inherently anti-immigrant. Undocumented workers are easily exploited and drive down wages and working conditions for everyone. Guest workers who are here at their employers’ will are also targets for exploitation. It is, therefore, no surprise that unions have been working with immigrants rights groups to find a political solution that will benefit them both by offering a road to citizenship for undocumented workers in this country.
SEIU released this statement about the proposed immigration reform:
AFLCIO includes this statement on its website:
For another statement you can go to Change to Win .
Thanks on the SEIU info, but the AFL-CIO opposes this deal Here’s John Sweeney’s statement:
In your original comment you said: “But on our side, gosh: the unions aren’t happy about any deal that expands the labor pool, even if it extends citizenship (and humanity) to a lot of hard-working folks who’ve earned it.”
Your quote from Sweeney contradicts that. AFL-CIO opposes the legislation because it does not go far enough to protect the rights of immigrant workers and by extension citizen workers. It says essentially the same thing as SEIU does: give the immigrant workers a path to legalization and don’t create a class of serfs through the guest worker program.
If you want to say unions oppose the current legislation because it does not go far enough, that is one thing, but your origanal comment is off base.
Of course, the unions are not doing this out of altruism. They see the legalization of immigrant workers as a win/win situation.
Except they know that no bill with a Republican in the White House is going to go any further than this.
We’re distracting from BooMan’s original point, though, and I don’t want to sidetrack this further.
The primary job of hucksters like Falwell and Robertson and the whole Dobson/Perkins gang has always been to weaponize the ignorance of their followers under the banner of religiosity.
For the new breed of so-called “evangelical leaders” like the zealot Rick Warren, their primary job is the same. They just have to do it by exploiting somewhat different aspects of human character.
Where Falwell et al used the pervasive “fear of the ‘other'”, and used guilt to make people feel ashamed about disobeying their calls for action, the new breed exploits good old fashioned greed more directly. The “prosperity message” so brazenly pitched from the pulpit of these new, gauche Wal-Mart style mega churches is the foundation for the sort of “You’re all on your own” authoritarianism that the powermad have pursued throughout history. And of course, the fact that it goes directly against the most fundamental element of the purported teachings of the “messiah” these folks claim to believe in, (that being that we are urged to always help those less fortunate); this glaring fact goes unremarked upon in all the writings and sermons these folks produce.
In the end, zealots really have no principles strong enough to restrain their more basic needs to reinforce their own beliefs, sustain their own power, and protect whatever interpretation they have of their own ideology.
So the weaponization of ignorance from the religious right will continue apace, and the results will continue to be devastating as more and more of our politicians buy into the whole nasty mess.