When Would Jesus Bolt?

Amy Sullivan has an interesting article in the current issue of The Washington Monthly. She profiles Dr. Randy Brinso, a physician from Montgomery who is a lifelong Republican and founder of Redeem the Vote. In the last election cycle Redeem the Vote used Christian music and radio stations to register and mobilize significant numbers of young evangelical Christians. But now Brinso is talking to Democrats. Why? He has been working in southern states to introduce bible literacy classes into public schools, the kind of bible classes that pass constitutional muster because they treat the Bible as literature in the classroom. But he is running up against opposition and its not coming from Democrats but Republicans who think he is tossing an olive branch to conservative Democrats. That's the last thing the Republicans want. They want perpetual war, so they are turning against Brinso.

Sullivan also talks about the broadening concerns of evangelical moderates who care about abortion but who also care about social justice and care for the environment. These folks are increasing growing frustrated with the Republican party because they see the party pandering to them about compassionate conservativism but then siding with the interests of big business every time. Meet another evangelical leader who is growing frustrated with the Republican party:

While Brinson has been working with Democrats in Alabama on the Bible literacy bill, other evangelicals are having their own road to Damascus moments. One of them is Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), and a frequent subject of profiles on “kinder, gentler” evangelicals in outlets like Newsweek and USA Today. Cizik has spent years trying to get evangelicals invested in what he calls “creation care,” the idea that God gave them responsibility for tending to the earth. His hope has been that a Republican administration would be more likely to pay attention to lobbying from its own base on issues like carbon dioxide emissions than from liberal environmentalists.

In early January, I talked to Cizik about his efforts to get evangelicals to take a stand on climate change, a move that would place considerable political pressure on the administration to take the problem seriously. The NAE represents 52 denominations with 45,000 churches and 30 million members across the country—getting them all to agree on something is no easy task, but Cizik had made impressive strides and was optimistic. Convinced that his only course of action was to work with Republicans, he spent an hour patiently explaining why evangelicals were better off trying to change Republican attitudes about the environment rather than working with Democrats who already embraced his position. Not able to help myself, I argued back. It's not as if the Bush administration doesn't support environmental policies because they hate trees. It's because they have powerful business supporters who don't like regulation. Still, Cizik held firm, insisting that evangelicals had to change “our own party.”

A month later, I ran into Cizik at the National Prayer Breakfast. That morning, he had opened up his Washington Post to find an article based on a letter to his boss from the old guard—Dobson, Colson, Wildmon, and the rest—suggesting, in the way that Tony Soprano makes suggestions, that the NAE back off its plan to take a public position on global warming. “Bible-believing evangelicals,” the letter-writers argued, “disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.” The leaked letter was a blatant attempt to torpedo Cizik's efforts, and it had worked. The NAE would take no stand on climate change.

There was no doubt that the administration had prevailed on the more pliable figures of the Christian Right to whack one of their own. Cizik was beside himself. It was hard to resist the “I told you so” moment, and I didn't. But when I suggested to him that this was an example of the way that business seemed to win out most of the time when religious and business interests came into conflict in GOP politics, he stopped me. “Not most of the time,” he corrected. “Every time. Every single time.” And he's no longer sure that can change. “Maybe not with this administration.... We need to stop putting all of our eggs in one basket—that's just not good politics.”

Cizik wasn't the only example of this shift at the Prayer Breakfast. At the main event earlier in the day, keynote speaker Bono (of U2 and antipoverty crusading fame) enjoyed a far more enthusiastic reception than President Bush, whose applause was, several conservative religious leaders told me, surprisingly weak. (“He got a standing ovation when he entered, but that's because you have to stand,” observed one evangelical.) It could have had something to do with the fact that Bono highlighted this tension between what's good for corporate interests and what serves the cause of justice. He went through a litany of examples—trade agreements that make it harder for Third-World countries to sell their products, tax policies that shift debt to the next generation, patent laws that raise the price of life-saving drugs—and then put the challenge to his audience: “God will not accept that. Mine won't, at least. Will yours?”

Evangelicals—particularly centrists—are increasingly answering, “No!”...

I hope Democrats are listening to this.