Note: The full text of this blog can be read in my regular "Dispatches from the Beltway" column on Religion Dispatches.

E.J. Dionne’s bold pronouncement that “the era of the Religious Right is over” has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Those who agree cite the growing support for broadening the evangelical agenda to include issues like the environment (a.k.a. “creation care”), poverty, and HIV/AIDS. They also point to the graying of the Religious Right, most prominently the deaths of Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy, and the virtual collapse of the Christian Coalition. Moreover, prominent old guard leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson have seriously damaged their credibility with many evangelicals by endorsing Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and Rudy Guiliani, a thrice-married, pro-choice New York governor, while passing over fellow-evangelical candidate Mick Huckabee. No one need ask for a more bald demonstration of prioritizing power over principle from the self-proclaimed leaders of “values voters.”

Skeptics of the decline of the Religious Right, on the other hand, cite the huge infrastructure, resources, and reach the Religious Right has built over the last few decades (to take just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the Religious Right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay.

If the argument that “the era of the Religious Right is over” depended solely on what one might call the “graying and greening” argument—that the leadership is aging and out of touch and that a few issues like the environment have simply been attached to a persistent static core—I too would be skeptical. I want to argue, however, that the reason I believe Dionne is right is that a more thoroughgoing and measurable shift is happening within the evangelical community, one that represents not simply a broader agenda but also a significantly different spirit and worldview.

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Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.

Labels: culture wars, dispatches from the beltway, environment, evangelicals, religious right

Note: Cross-posted at Religion Dispatches.

As I noted in last week's Dispatches from Inside the Beltway, the official exit polls sponsored by the media have been skewed toward the Republican party in terms of religion. . The exit polls have asked more questions about religion to Republicans in every comparable state so far, and nowhere have they asked Democrats if they were "born again or evangelical." It is time for the media to jettison this outdated script about religion and fix this bias in the exit polls.

Faith in Public Life has take the lead in identifying and publicizing this problem, and last week following the Super Tuesday primaries they fielded their own post-election poll in MO and TN--a poll that for the first time identified evangelical voters among both Republicans and Democrats. After the poll results were released yesterday, Katie Barge (Communications Director for Faith in Public Life), Rev. Jim Walls (CEO, Sojourners), and Rev. Joel Hunter (Pastor, Northland Church; former president of the Christian Coalition), and I participated in a press call with over 30 reporters to talk about how this bias distorts our understanding of both politics and religion. You can listen to the call here.

The post-election poll found the following important findings:

• Senator Hillary Clinton's support from white evangelicals surpassed that of Senator Barach Obama's (MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%).
• Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the GOP has a lock on white evangelical voters, 1 in 3 evangelicals voted in the Democratic primary, something the official exit polls could not tell us. To put that into perspective, that's 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in MO and 182,000 in TN (a number greater than, for example, all African American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state).
• Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and tackling HIV/AIDS.

These important numbers are supported by findings from other research I and others have done over the last two years. Here are three lessons the media needs to learn in order to get the religion story right this year:

1. White evangelicals are an important constituency for both parties and are no longer a lock for the GOP.

• Evangelicals are an important part of the Democratic base. In both 2004 and 2006, Democratic candidates actually received slightly more votes from white Evangelicals than from Black Protestants, an important base group for Democrats. In 2004, 14% of John Kerry’s votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 13% from Black Protestants (Green 2004). In 2006, 11.3% of Democratic House Candidate votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 11% from Black Protestants (NEP Exit Poll, 2006).
• Young evangelicals (under 30). Since 2005, affiliation with the GOP has dropped 15 points, from 55% to 40% (Pew 2006).

2. White Evangelicals are not monolithic, even on hot-button social issues.

• The one-fifth, one-third, on-half formula: up to half of evangelicals are in play. In research I co-authored with Rachel Laser, Randy Brinson, and Joe Battaglia at Third Way, we found that evangelicals are actually 1/5 progressive, 1/3 moderate, and 1/2 conservative, a patter that held up even over hot-button social issues. These evangelical progressives and moderates make up half of evangelicals, 52 million adults.
  

3. There is an emerging movement among rank and file evangelicals to move beyond the narrow political issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

• The American Values Survey (AVS 2006), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation, found that 8 in 10 evangelicals thought issues like poverty and affordable health care were more important in the country today that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
• The old Religious Right leaders who are clinging to the narrow agenda of abortion and same-sex marriage are increasingly out of touch and no longer calling the shots. AVS also found, for example, that a plurality (44%) of evangelicals said that James Dobson and Pat Robertson did NOT speak for them. Also, tellingly, nearly a quarter of young evangelicals (under 30) said they did not know enough about these leaders to answer the question.

The evidence has been stacking up for some time now, as Rev. Jim Wallis put it on the call yesterday, that "evangelicals are leaving the Religious Right in droves." While there have been some important media stories that have gotten this admittedly complex story right, the skewed exit polling we have now is sure to fuel biased reporting. If the major media outlets that fund the exit polls want to keep wrapping themelves in self-congratulatory slogans such as "fair and balanced" and "best political team on television," they need to let go of their old script, dig deeper, and give us the unbiased coverage of religion and politics we deserve.

Labels: evangelicals, exit polls, primaries

Note: Crossposted at StreetProphets.

Despite a drumbeat of public criticism by Faith in Public Life and others about biased exit polling on religion by the major media networks, the exit polls continue to ask more questions about religion to Republicans than Democrats.

I wrote yesterday in my "Dispatches from the Beltway" column in the debut issue of Religion Dispatches about how this bias distorts our understanding of religion among both parties.

Here's the current tally:

• 25 states have had both Republican and Democratic primaries
• 20 of these states had state-wide exit polls
• All of these states asked more questions about religious affiliation to Republicans than Democrats. (Only one of these, AZ, was a Super Tuesday state).

Upshot about the major media exit poll bias:

• They have asked Republicans about religion in every exit poll, but have NOT asked Democrats ANYTHING about religion in 3 states (IA, MI, NV).
• They have NOT asked Democrats ANYWHERE about whether they were "evangelical or born again."

It's time for the media to update their script and give us balanced coverage of the role of religion in both parties.

Labels: evangelicals, exit polls, media, primaries, religion

Note: This originally posted 2/5/08 on Religion Dispatches, a new daily online magazine dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices. I will be writing a regular column, "Dispatches from the Beltway," there in 2008.
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Old plotlines die hard, especially when they have the seductive clarity of binary divides: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, us vs. them. Nowhere is this tendency truer than in stories about religion. We have witnessed a real sea-change in the relationship between religion and progressive politics since 2004, and some of these shifts have been noted in major news stories, such as the growing coverage of the complexity of the white evangelical community. But too often, the mainstream media is still trying to force the current complexities and realignments into an outdated script.

In my former life as a software designer, we lived by the mantra, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Media storylines about religion and national elections, and thereby public perceptions, are driven by two major factors: exit polls (controlled by the major media outlets) and the selection of sources for stories by reporters. There is mounting evidence that much of the mainstream media is operating with a perversion of this mantra, a kind of “garbage in, gospel out” approach that begins and ends with its own self-verifying, dated stereotypes about religion in American public life.

The heart of the old script was the mythology of the so-called “moral values voters”--voters who were highly religious, Republican, and supposedly cared about prohibiting same-sex marriage and abortion above all else. We now know that despite the hype, the single exit poll question upon which those conclusions were based in 2004 was deeply flawed.

In a New York Times Op-ed four days after the 2004 election, Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News and a dissenting member of the team that drafted the questionnaire, cautioned that the inclusion on the exit poll of “this hot-button catch phrase…created a deep distortion--one that threatens to misinform the political discourse for years to come.” A series of subsequent polls, such as the American Values Survey (AVS), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life in 2006, showed how distorting these assumptions were. AVS found that Americans in fact think mostly about “the honesty and integrity of the candidate” when voting their values. Even among white evangelicals, the group that was supposedly synonymous with “moral values voters,” only 1 in 5 (19 percent) thought primarily about the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage when voting their values.

Since 2004, much of the mainstream media has unfortunately continued to reinforce the assumptions that religion is only relevant to conservatives and Republicans. A recent study by Media Matters for America, "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media," documented the continued bias in linking conservative politics and religion. The study found that while media coverage of religion has increased significantly since 2004, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

Despite these well-known problems, in the exit polling in the 2008 primaries so far, the major media news outlets have once again pulled out their dog-eared script on religion and politics as they constructed the exit polls. In the Iowa and Michigan, Democrats weren’t asked about religion at all. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, more questions were asked of Republican voters on faith than Democratic voters. And nowhere have Democrats been asked if they were evangelical or born again, despite the fact that in 2006 white evangelicals made up 11.3 percent of the Democratic house vote nationwide, casting slightly more votes for Democratic candidates for example than black Protestants.

Even noting the source of objections to this practice is a testimony to the new religious landscape. Leah Daughtry, Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee (and herself an ordained Pentecostal minister) recently lamented in a Washington Post Op-ed that the biased exit polls drove media stories that

“often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats.”

Similarly, a group of prominent evangelical leaders also objected to this prejudicial polling, declaring that these surveys

“pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party.”

As these leaders attest, this skewed coverage is damaging both to politics and to religion and diminishes our understanding of American public life. Hopefully the media will update their script with more equitable exit polling and balanced sources heading into Super Tuesday and through the home stretch of the election cycle.

Labels: dispatches from the beltway, evangelicals, exit polls, media

Today, I am standing as a co-author with Third Way at a national press conference to release a paper, "Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values between Evangelicals and Progressives." The Third Way paper--the result of nearly a year of research and coalition building--includes original analysis of the most recent public opinion research on Evangelicals and a corresponding set of recommendations on how progressives and Evangelicals can develop lasting and deeper coalitions. The paper also outlines new, common ground approaches to issues such as reducing the need for abortion, affirming the human dignity of gay and lesbian people, working for responsible progress in the treatment of human embryos, and respecting the role of religion in the public square.

E.J. Dionne wrote a strong column today about our paper, "A Treaty in the Culture Wars: Requiem for the Religious Right?", where he calls this effort an "important sign that religious conservatives are facing the disintegration of their movement."

The following are a summary of my remarks delivered at the press conference:

I stand here today keenly aware of my own multiple identities. First, I stand today with Third Way as a progressive. Like Rachel, prior to co-authoring this paper, I worked with a number of progressive organizations, most prominently serving as the founding director and senior fellow of the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation. I have published a book and several articles exploring future directions for liberalism, and I am currently completing a book on the growing progressive religious movement in America.

But I also grew up as an Evangelical in Mississippi, earned a degree from a Southern Baptist college and then a Master of Divinity degree from a Southern Baptist seminary in Texas where I trained for the ministry before pursuing a Ph.D. in religion.

Both of these identities have informed a growing conviction that I share with many others who know these two communities: that we are ready to end the culture wars. Long and bitter conflicts around cultural issues have not only stifled progress toward common goals, but have damaged our sense that a shared national life is even possible. We are here today to insist that it is possible and to chart a course forward together.

As we begin to chart that course, I want to draw your attention to one of the most important insights from our research about the diversity of Evangelicals as a group. During our research, we found a consistent pattern across a number of broad measures that we dubbed the one-fifth, one-third, one-half formula:

• One-fifth of Evangelicals [representing 5% of the general population] are progressive;
• One-third of Evangelicals [representing 8% of the general population] are moderates who share some progressive values; and
• One-half of Evangelicals [representing 13% of the general population] are conservatives who may be partners on particular issues.

These patterns suggest that while Evangelicals are more conservative than the general population, half of Evangelicals (representing 13% of the population, approximately 52 million adult citizens) have views that are in sync with or open to progressive ideas. The upshot is that Evangelicals are more diverse than conventional wisdom would suggest, and this one-fifth, one-third, one-half pattern persists even on the more challenging terrain of cultural issues.

This, I believe, is cause for great hope, as is the very presence here today of so many people, Evangelical and progressive, who are committed to doing the hard work of reasoning together.

Labels: culture wars, evangelicals, religion

Note: This originally posted on Faith and Public Life's Blog as part of a dialogue with Randy Brinson and Pastor Bill Devlin of Redeem the Vote; Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary and Center for American Progress; Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary; and Rev. Rich Killmer of National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

One thread running through this exchange is the need to understand the size (one in four Americans) and the complexity of Evangelicals as a group. Shaun Casey and Randy Brinson are right to point out that one significant upshot of the new coalitions being built is that they expose once and for all the fallacy that Evangelicals are a monolithic group. This complexity is especially true as one moves down the chain from the most vocal political (and increasingly partisan) activists like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, to umbrella groups like the National Association of Evangelicals (remembering to note that the largest Evangelical denomination, Southern Baptists, are not members of the NAE), to non-denominational relief groups, denominations, and finally to individuals. In Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want, Christian Smith summed up his research among rank and file Evangelicals by noting, “When it comes to politics, the millions of ordinary evangelicals look not like a disciplined, charging army, but something more like a divided and hesitant extended family.”

To give just two telling examples, The American Values Survey that I directed last fall at the Center for American Values found that:
• Like the general public, when thinking about voting their values, more Evangelicals (44%) think about the honesty, integrity and responsibility of the individual candidate than any other single issue. Only 1 out of 5 (19%) Evangelicals thought primarily about same-sex marriage or abortions when voting their values.
• Fully 44% of Evangelicals say that Evangelical leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson do NOT speak for them.

Because of the complexity and decentralization that Shaun cites, a clear map doesn’t really exist right now; there is a state of ferment among Evangelicals that has opened up possibilities for new thinking and new ideas. But the partial maps we put together along the way matter. On this point, I am grateful to Susan Thistlethwaite for putting on the table the “enormous concerns” that she and others feel about these new coalitions, both because these concerns are operative in various ways in progressive circles and should be addressed directly and because they are prudent for politics in the real world—something people in faith circles sometimes neglect, as Susan notes, to their later regret.

But I want to quibble with Susan’s map and note the connection between the landscape of the map and the magnitude of the worries. Susan names six groups that make up the landscape: four groups (gospel of prosperity megachurches, creationists, theocrats, and religious right activists) are clearly difficult partners for political progressives; one group (“intent on saving souls”) is either problematic in terms of the challenge it represents to the progressive value of pluralism, or simply an irrelevant sectarian group disengaged with politics; and the final group is “left-wing” Evangelicals who are already allies in significant ways. Although Susan notes that there are others along this continuum, naming only these groups with no place for the large group of Evangelical moderates makes progressive coalitions seem either like fool’s errands or fait accompli.

Creating accurate maps that reflect a mix of realism, humility, and generosity is a key part of the work progressives need to do in this time. To link this back to my earlier post, there is a fine line between prudence and defensiveness, and more accurate maps can help us avoid the latter.

(Note: there are at least two major projects underway that will address this mapping problem: David Gushee’s forthcoming book in January 2008, A Public Witness of the Evangelical Center: The Future of Faith in American Politics, and a forthcoming paper in September that I’ve been working on with Rachel Laser at the Third Way Culture Project and Randy Brinson at Redeem the Vote).

Labels: evangelicals

Note: This originally posted on Faith and Public Life's Blog as part of a dialogue with Randy Brinson and Pastor Bill Devlin of Redeem the Vote; Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary and Center for American Progress; Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary; and Rev. Rich Killmer of National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1, RSV).

More and more people across the country are realizing that the recent levels of polarization of politics and politicization of religion has been bad for both, and that the continuation of the conversations between Evangelicals and progressives might be a key step in recalling a more prophetic religion and a more meaningful politics.

As someone who grew up Southern Baptist and whose commitments to progressive politics were formed in the crucible of the Deep South, I have had a somewhat unique vantage point as I’ve worked at this intersection both as a scholar studying the role of religion in public debates, and as a consultant on specific projects, such as a current effort to bring together progressives and Evangelicals on cultural issues with The Third Way and Redeem the Vote.

I want to focus here on one of the deepest obstacle to progress: a sense of defensiveness, particularly the ideological malady that thinks that giving an inch is opening the floodgates to disaster. For example, in Evangelicals circles, it is well-known that James Dobson and the Christian Coalition have both strongly resisted efforts to broaden the evangelical agenda to issues like poverty and global warming, claiming these are not core issues. In progressive circles, I personally encountered a similar defensiveness after giving a presentation of public opinion data that showed the promise of common ground between progressives and Evangelicals. The first comment came from an agitated prominent progressive blogger, who, on the bases of his own biases alone, proceeded to tell us not only that any outreach strategy was a waste of time but went on to seriously propose that a more prudent strategy would be to find ways to simply suppress the Evangelical vote.

The great twentieth century theological H. Richard Niebuhr identified a sense of defensiveness at the heart of what can go wrong not only with religious groups but all human groups and called for a movement from an ethics of defensiveness (which he noted resulted ultimately in an ethics of death) to an ethics of faithfulness and responsibility. The key to this move was to articulate (“to confess” in religious terms) our own positions as honestly as possible while embracing our human finitude, which requires the modest notion that we might be wrong. That simple acknowledgment gives life to a humility that opens up space for new conversations and breaks down old orthodoxies.

It is worth noting that at least three significant things can happen as we move from defensiveness to faithfulness, a process Niebuhr thought had to be ongoing:
1. Space opens up for creativity on issues that seemed completely intractable. For example, as I noted on my blog last week, Democrats in the House recently made a quiet but significant step toward healing one of America's deepest divides by passing the "Reducing the Need for Abortions Initiative" as part of the 2008 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for 2008.
2. Opponents are humanized and become more complex. For example, in a recent meeting, a prominent Catholic leader told a largely surprised group of progressives that he had hosted visitors in his home to pro-life protests and anti-war protests on back to back weekends and that in his theological framework, these were perfectly consistent things to do.
3. The possibility of mutual critique emerges as the excesses of one ideology become more visible viewed in the light of the other. For example, progressives begin to think more about the importance of changed hearts and Evangelicals more about transformed institutions.

Although these are modest steps, they are significant. Thankfully, we are beginning to see a new day and the emergence of a meaningful national politics that requires less fear and more faith—both in our fellow citizens and in our own abilities to hold our principles while listening to others and looking for the common good.

Labels: common good, evangelicals, niebuhr