Losing My Religion

After the 2004 elections, religious conservatives were riding high. Newly anointed by pundits as “values voters” — a more flattering label than “religious right” — they claimed credit for propelling George W. Bush to two terms in the White House. Even in wartime, they had managed to fixate the nation on their pet issues: opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.

Now with the 2008 race taking shape, religious conservatives sense that they've taken a tumble. Their issues are no longer at the forefront, and their leaders have failed so far to coalesce around any single candidate, as they did around Bush or Reagan.

What does unite them right now is their dismay — even panic — at the idea of Rudy Giuliani as the Republican nominee, because of his support for abortion rights and gay rights, as well as what they regard as a troubling history of marital infidelity. But what to do about it is where they again diverge, with some religious conservatives last week threatening to bolt to a third party if Mr. Giuliani gets the nomination, and others arguing that this is the sure road to defeat.

Many religious conservatives were proud to claim the mantle that Karl Rove bestowed on them as “the base of the Republican Party.” Now they fear they may have lapsed unwittingly into the same role that African-Americans often lay claim to in the Democratic Party: a dependable minority constituency that is courted by candidates but never really gets to call the shots.

The GOP candidates are certainly sending signals to that effect. While they’re eager to get as many conservative religious votes as they can, they’re no doubt aware of a shift since 2004 — that perhaps these voters aren’t the powerful bloc that they were once taken to be, that they don’t all answer to the same leaders, and that they might even be more pragmatic than in the past, more willing to sacrifice purity for viability in a candidate.

Scholars who study the role of religion in politics now say it is possible that the Bush years were an anomaly and that evangelicals, of whom religious conservatives are only a subset, could find themselves back where they were before — divided among themselves and just one of many interest groups vying desperately for attention.

“It’s not so much that evangelicals are more divided than they were before, it’s that Bush himself was a unique candidate,” said Corwin E. Smidt, director of the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College, an evangelical school in Grand Rapids, Mich. “It’s partly going back to previous patterns.”

And that stings. Religious conservatives were alarmed last month when none of the Republican front-runners showed up for the Values Voter Debate Straw Poll in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. More than 40 groups, some of them major organizations known for their capacity to mobilize voters, had put together the event. Questions were directed even at the no-show candidates, and many of those questions were angry.

“Beyond their cowardice, there’s an arrogance on the part of these candidates,” said Janet L. Folger, the president of Faith2Action, who helped organize the debate. “The arrogance is this: ‘We are just taking your votes for granted. You have nowhere else to go.’ ”

Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of Eagle Forum and a leader in the social conservative movement since 1972, said: “If the Republican Party kicks away the religious conservatives, then they’re entitled to be called the stupid party. You have to keep your own friends. A sense of betrayal can become more compelling than other issues.”

The overwhelming winner of the Fort Lauderdale straw poll, as well as a poll taken by a religious conservative group in South Carolina, was Mike Huckabee, a folksy Southern Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas. But Mr. Huckabee has not yet registered in double digits in national polls and lags way behind in fund-raising.

Religious conservative leaders say they are having passionate debates in private over whether to choose a candidate based on viability or purity. Old allies find themselves fractured among the camps of Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul and Mr. Huckabee.

The spectacle has laid bare the enduring myth that evangelicals are a monolith that is “easy to command,” to use the phrase made famous by a Washington Post article in 1993.

Evangelical Protestants make up about 26 percent of the population. But according to surveys in the new book “The Faith Factor” by John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, that pie can be sliced even further. Only 12 percent of the population are the evangelical Protestants Mr. Green calls “traditionalists,” the political and theological conservatives who make up the bedrock of the religious right. Almost an equal share (11% of the population) are evangelical “centrists” and about 3 percent are “modernists,” groups that are politically less predictable.

As for “easy to command,” just look at what happened late last month, when one of the oracles of the Christian right, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, in Colorado Springs, sent an e-mail message denigrating Mr. Thompson, the “Law & Order” actor and former Tennessee senator whom some conservative Christians are latching onto as the antidote to Mr. Giuliani.

Dr. Dobson’s leaked message said that Mr. Thompson “can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail.” He added: “And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

That prompted a flurry of negative response from loyal listeners of Dr. Dobson’s radio program. Conservative Christian leaders like Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention stepped forward to defend Mr. Thompson. In South Carolina, which has an early primary next year, Mr. Thompson was still running strong in a recent poll of Republican primary voters by The Los Angeles Times. Dr. Dobson, a psychologist, is revered by many evangelical Christians for his advice on child rearing, but this episode suggests that he does not command them on politics.

He is only one of a core of old lions on the religious right whose dominance has been challenged in recent years with the emergence of new leaders, like the Rev. Rick Warren, a megachurch pastor in California who wrote “The Purpose Driven Life,” and the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs in the National Association of Evangelicals.

These new leaders are pushing evangelicals to expand their agenda beyond abortion and homosexuality, to include issues like poverty, AIDS and global warming. Like other Americans, evangelicals tell pollsters they care a great deal about the war in Iraq, health care, immigration and security. If evangelicals more and more vote like average Americans, it becomes increasingly complex for the candidates to calculate how to win them over.

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign is betting that he can do without the hard-core “religious right” for whom abortion and homosexuality are litmus tests. A New York Times/CBS News poll of white born-again or evangelical Republican primary voters taken last month found that 30 percent said it would be possible for them to vote for a candidate they didn’t agree with on issues like abortion or same-sex marriage. But 59 percent said they could not.

Some of the states with early primaries have high percentages of Republican primary voters who were willing to identify themselves in 2000 as “part of the conservative Christian political movement, also know as the religious right” (Iowa 37 %; Florida, 30%; and in South Carolina, where exit polls identified the white religious right, it was 33 %).

The religious right may still try to anoint a Republican candidate, get behind him and push. Some leaders said in interviews that they were waiting to see how the Republican candidates performed at a conference of the Family Research Council, a religious conservative group in Washington, later this month. All of the Republicans, except Mr. Giuliani, have agreed to make a pitch to that group.

The panic that has gripped the leadership of the religious right is over how the only candidate who doesn’t stand with them on abortion and has barely bothered to court them can prevail; Mr. Giuliani is even viewed favorably in polls among voters who identify themselves as born-again Christians.

Rick Scarborough, president of Vision America, a Texas-based group that has a network of 5,000 pastors willing to mobilize their churches to vote, was at the recent meeting of those who threatened to back a third-party candidate, and he said they were not just bluffing.

“I am not going to cast a sacred vote granted to me by the blood of millions of God-fearing Americans who died on the fields of battle for freedom, for a candidate who says it’s O.K. to kill the unborn,” he said. “I just can’t.”

“It’s not about winning elections. It’s about honoring Christ.”

Note: REM