Jima Wallis has an article in Time Magazine announcing "The Religious Right's Era is Over."
While there are hopeful signs and Wallis is right about there being a new "dialogue" rather than a "monologue" by the Religious Right regarding politics in the public square, Wallis is premature in his diagnosis predicting the demise of the Religious Right.
The Religious Right has spent more than 30 years organizing politically at the grassroots level. They get out the vote consistently.
The progressive religious community is not organized politically and every attempt to get them organized is frustrated by premature obituaries from people like Wallis.
In politics, all that matters is the number of voters that turn out for an election. Had moderate Baptists not been so slow in grasping that fact, the Southern Baptist Convention would not be controlled by fundamentalists. Texas Baptists and Virginia Baptists understood this fact. That is why they are still led by moderate, Mainstream Baptists.
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Bruce, Don't you think the religious right taps into a biblically uninformed civil religion that pervades much of our country? It seems to me that most of the successful "mega" religious organizations have this in common -- they tap into this civil relgion and use it validate the prevailing ethos or to make the adherents "feel good". Whether it's feeling good about our country, or our lifestyle or whatever. Religious right organizations will come and go, often going as the leader du jour is shown to have feet of clay. But as long as the biblically insensitive, un(self)critical civil religion exists, the "flock" will be easily led by someone who knows what buttons to push. [I have been told, ahem, by people who knew people who knew people who knew, that when he was first beginning to campaign for President, George W. met with religious leaders. He was observed to be not interested in their issues so much as he was in the religious language & buzz words he should use in his speeches. Ergo, for all his intellectual dumbness, Dubya understands the point, at least at a visceral level.]
Frederick Clarkson critiques Jim Wallis here:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/2/20/0241/15133
The tone of the critique of Wallis is some times a little harsh to my ear, but Clarkson basically sounds right.
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