Peter Beinart says yes, that Sarah Palin is "the end of the line." Mike Madden goes to Ted Haggard's old church and predicts the heyday of the conservative megachurch is over.
Not so fast -- I've seen this movie before. Consider these historical examples of premature obituary-writing: in 1988, after Pat Robertson lost the Republican primary in South Carolina, William Safire wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Robertson "is finished" and "the Fundies are not a serious political force and their current hero is not a serious political candidate. They are a minor force; their pet peeves will be given lip service at the convention." This year, fundie activists told me John McCain, who they don't even like very much, let them have their way with the party's platform.
Five years later, after Bill Clinton was elected in the wake of the religious right's disaffection with George H.W. Bush, the Boston Globe ran a story that reported, "A holy war is about to break out inside the Christian Right, and the way it is resolved may change the character of American politics. ... On one side are crusaders who believe that opposition to gay rights and abortion still provides the path to the political promised land. On the other are equally ardent warriors who have wearied of the relentless drumbeat against homosexuals, abortion providers and feminists and believe that economic issues provide the movement with its brightest future. In short, this battle comes down to a small question with big implications: Should hardliners soft-pedal their own message?"
We all know that soft-pedaling didn't happen, and still isn't happening today; witness the millions spent on anti-Obama advertising focused solely on the lie that Obama favors infanticide, and the millions more spent trying to ban gay marriage in California.
In 1998, The Washington Post reported that the alliance between the religious right and the Republican Party is "fraying." "For almost two decades, social conservatives have complained that the Republican Party establishment has repeatedly betrayed them by neglecting the issues that matter most to the right: abortion, school prayer and homosexuality. During campaigns, party leaders promise to support a conservative social-issues agenda, only to abandon it after Election Day in favor of tax, budget, and regulatory legislation." The piece even described how Tom DeLay, of all people, was infuriating James Dobson for not paying enough attention to their anti-gay, anti-abortion agenda. DeLay, of course, went on to became one of the movement's most stalwart allies in Congress.
Over the ten year period between George H.W. Bush's defeat of Pat Robertson in the Republican primary and the height of the Clinton witchhunting spearheaded by the religious right, the movement was left for dead on numerous occasions, and it has consistently proved resilient. It always has something a little different -- swinging from the wild-eyed Robertson to the "compassionate conservative" Bush -- and I'd look for something different than the Buchananite-version of Palin in 2012 (or possibly not Palin at all).
The movement will not be dead on Nov. 5 regardless of the outcome tomorrow. It's so easy to peg the movement's vitality to presidential campaigns, but it's really so much bigger than that. As a reporter, the most fascinating and alarming feature of the movement is not its sway over one presidential campaign or another, but how this movement, which knows not blue state or red, evangelicalism or Catholicism, mainline Protestant or nondenominational megachurch, shapes so many Americans' thinking and political dialog, whether about school prayer, creationism, public displays of religious symbols, proselytizing in schools, abortion, gay marriage, religious warfare and foreign policy.
There are a lot of people trying to shake the religious right loose from its moorings, including moderate evangelicals who nonetheless can't seem to shake themselves from the old culture war issues of abortion and gay marriage. It will be up to the Republican Party to tell the religious right to get lost, or decide, again, that it can't build a winning coalition without it. If they were smart, both the Party and the movement will give themselves at least a superficial makeover after the election, kinder, gentler, and all that. But I'd be misleading you if I joined the other observers and reporters telling you the sun is setting on the political expression and mobilization of religious fundamentalism in America.
--Sarah Posner
