With the passing of Rev. Jerry Falwell, there are quite a few people writing about his legacy and about state of political evangelicalism in America today. One example is from John Heilemann, writing in New York magazine. There are two points I want to discuss from Heilemann’s article. First, the rise of the megachurch and a different kind of political agenda:
The face of the modern Evangelical movement belongs instead to Rick Warren, the pastor of Orange County, California’s Saddleback Church (regular attendance: 20,000) and the author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold more hardback copies (over 25 million) than any nonfiction book in history.
Now, on many social issues, Warren is just as conservative as Falwell. Abortion, bad. Gay marriage, bad. Etc. But whereas Falwell described aids as “the wrath of a just God against homosexuals,” Warren has donated millions of dollars to fight HIV in Africa. Whereas Falwell bemoaned the emerging strain of Evangelical environmentalism as “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus,” Warren declares, “The environment is a moral issue.” And regarding his pro-life stance, Warren says, “I’m just not rabid about it.”
Here is what I think about this. Falwell and Robertson were not authentic evangelicals, but charlatans that worked in tandem with powerful business interests to lead the lower white middle class into that arms of the GOP. They used every trick in the book. They played on regionalism and on race. They attacked the sexual mores of urbanites. They played on the elitism of coastal sophisticates. They turned taxation into a sin that pays for pornography and abortion and welfare mothers. And, above all, they told their flocks that their religion was under attack by liberal judges, the liberal media, and a secular Washington. Most of this was pure hooey…in some cases it was a total inversion of reality. The coastal, secular elites were precisely the Wall Street financiers that were working in tandem with Falwell and Robertson. Those tax breaks and that deregulation was serving the very people that were being sold as the enemy. On some issues, like gun control and federally mandated speed limits, the liberals were indeed badly out of touch with the values of the rural and southern lower white middle class. But on economic issues, the urban-based liberals’ policies dovetailed with their interests quite nicely.
What has happened over the last fifteen years is a more authentic evangelicalism has emerged, that doesn’t seem to narrowly follow the dictates of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. That is why we are seeing a spontaneous and genuine environmentalism emerging in the evangelical community. But, another thing has changed, and it is very important.
But unlike in Falwell’s heyday, the center of gravity of the Evangelical world is no longer the rural South; it’s the suburbs and exurbs of the West, Southwest, and Midwest. The movement is younger, better educated, and richer than it was at the height of the Moral Majority.
Another way of putting this is that the evangelical movement is growing among people in the middle and upper middle class. This means that more and more of them are actually in a financial position to benefit in reality from Republicans policies. They have capital gains, they have dividends, they pay a high marginal rate income tax, and they aspire to fall under the estate tax. This all came to a head in the 2004 election. The cultural and economic interests of evangelicals aligned with Bushism to a shocking degree.
[Bill] Galston, [a Brookings Institution fellow], and other experts believe that Bush’s trouncing of Kerry among Evangelicals (by 78 to 22 percent) almost certainly will prove a topping-out point for the GOP. “For a community as large and diverse as Evangelicals,” Pew Forum fellow John Green observes, “for somebody to get almost four-fifths of the vote, we’re pretty close to the theoretical maximum.”
Things moved back in our direction in 2006 and Democrats won seats in several exurban and suburban (and even some rural) districts. This was probably a blip, or an anomaly, of Bush’s failed policies…especially the handling of Katrina and the war in Iraq. There is still simply too much alignment between the economic and cultural interests of the GOP and the increasingly affluent evangelical movement for Democrats to compete in the exurbs.
Environmentalism presents one inroad. But economic populism does not. This is where I see a new split. Economic populism has increasing appeal wherever people are feeling the expanding economic disparity. That is not in the exurbs except among those suffering foreclosures. The Democrats need to go back after the rural voters, the hard-pressed suburban voters, and work on policies that align with their urban base.
One last thing. Rudy Guiliani.
The GOP’s agenda is still popular with people that pay high taxes and hold socially conservative views, but everywhere else their policies are bankrupt. Nowhere is this more clear than their Global War on Terror. But…
Certainly we need some kind of avant-garde theory to cope with the anomaly of Giuliani, whose social-liberal record and, ahem, colorful private life should long ago have consigned him to the Falwellian dustbin for discarded pagans. But because of the sense that the fight against terrorism is the predominant issue of the age, religious voters seem remarkably open to him.
The fight against terrorism has special appeal to the evangelical community, and it plays into some of the worst features of the movement: xenophobia, religious bigotry, millenialism, Biblical literalism, and absolutism. If properly goaded the movement could form the basis for a truly proto-fascist party. Their openness to Guiliani demonstrates that these ugly characteristics trump their social conservatism. And this is one of the main reasons why the GOP can ill afford to admit defeat in Iraq and bring our troops home. The GWOT must continue and it must an active battle or the issue falls off the table and the national discussion. Not only Guiliani would become an instant irrelevance, but dozens of other lawmakers, too.
For Democrats, the job is to end the war, go back after rural voters and pinched suburban voters, and push green policies in the exurbs.
