Throughout the current campaign many pundits, myself included, have been riffing on variations of a theme entitled "what's wrong with the Evangelicals?" But I think our definition of a perfectly functioning Evangelical polity is somewhat unrealistic. We are using the 2004 presidential election as a standard—and that's a hard, nay, an almost impossible, standard to emulate.
Here are some of the unusual things that happened four years ago. First and foremost, in the person of George W. Bush, Evangelicals had themselves a keeper, an ideal candidate. In their eyes he was "one of us." The leadership was squarely behind him, as was the rank-and-file.
When the heaven and firmament of mass politics are aligned in this way then the possibilities of fund-raising, infrastructure building, get-out-the-vote drives are heightened exponentially. Add to this that dissenting Evangelicals--who did not view Bush as a keeper--were disorganized and groping about for their institutional bearings. (Doing their part to be helpful, the Democrats fronted a candidate who was sure to make most conservative Protestants schlep through Election-day tornadoes and tsunamis in order to reach the voting booth).
It is unreasonable to expect that these developments will be replicated this election season, or any time soon. And it is unreasonable to expect that the inability to replicate the electoral peculiarity that was 2004 constitutes a crisis.
Instead, think of Evangelicals as a constituency in flux. So what has changed in 2008? For one, the leadership is fractured—a state of affairs borne out by the fact that Huckabee, Romney, McCain and even Giuliani, all received high-profile endorsements from assorted kingmakers.
Next, the 2008 rank-and-file seem to be exercising their good Protestant prerogative to tune the leadership out. Third, a class of Progressive Evangelicals has found its voice (and its organizational coherence). And even non-Progressives are wondering aloud if there is more to doing God's work here on earth than securing amendments prohibiting abortion and gay marriage.
As such, the Evangelical agenda has diversified considerably. A candidate who panders to them had better be talking about the environment, foreign policy, economic issues, immigration, and so forth. Perhaps most importantly, I am noticing that more than a few Evangelicals are not questioning politics, as much as partisan politics. Their hearts and minds are open to all appeals—something the Democrats have understood.
In Tuesday's post, I called attention to a curiosity of the 2008 campaign that has yet to be widely discussed: Mike Huckabee, the alleged candidate of Evangelical America, was initially shunned by conservative Protestants for a good ten months. And when the latter did finally warm to him they never got much past a low simmer.
There does seem to be some warrant for the claim that Huckabee with his economic populism and views on immigration was too liberal (a claim that always makes secularists scratch their heads). On the other hand, it could be argued that Huckabee was too much of a standard-bearer of classic GOP positions and never really won over swing Evangelicals and religious independents.
Or perhaps, Evangelical America is growing so large, diverse and complex that no candidate could unite them as George W. Bush once did. That's a crisis, of sorts. But only for those Evangelicals who equate the well being of their faith with political gain.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
