Fineman: Evangelicals Fed Up With the GOP?

Howard Fineman writes at Newsweek:

... 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 elders of 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."

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