Industry Figure Tom Chappell

The New York Times has a nice piece about the disintegration of the religious right, and high time, too.

Much of the action takes place in Wichita, Kansas, which Thomas Frank might have had in mind when he wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a terrific book which chronicles the ways that the Republican Right has used the Religious Right as their dupes and pawns for the last 30 years.

But lately, the times, they are a-changin’. The top three most-influential conservative Christian pastors of Wichita megachurches have all left their pulpits in the last 14 months, some voted out by their own congregations:

“They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” [right-wing religious crackpot Terry Fox] told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

…The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” [Bill] Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

…Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young.

…”Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., …let’s just get out of there.’ ”

…In June of last year, in one of the few upsets since conservatives consolidated their hold on [Southern Baptists] 20 years ago, the establishment’s hand-picked candidates — well-known national figures in the convention — lost the internal election for the convention’s presidency. The winner, Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., campaigned on a promise to loosen up the conservatives’ tight control. He told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.”

Read the full story at The New York Times
“The Evangelical Crackup”
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
October 28, 2007