Not an issue?

By Ron Beasley

Christian Group Launches “Abortion President” Campaign against Barack Obama

Oh my. The fight against Barack Obama on abortion has officially begun. The Christian Defense Coalition, who are known to shock folks from time to time, have come up with a new campaign called: “Barack Obama: The Abortion President”. They are going to make clear that Obama wants taxpayers to foot the bill on abortions. They are also going to lay bare his record on abortion. They’ll conduct a news conference Tuesday in front of the Hart Senate Office Building where Obama’s Senate office is located.

This has worked for the Rethuglicans since they replaced race with abortion as a political issue in the 70s.  There is reason to believe that it is becoming increasingly less effective.  I have noted that Calvinistic religious movements rarely last more than a generation.  Over at Pacific Views Mary asks if the Strength of the Religious Right is Oversold?

Today OnTheMedia had an interview with Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. As a former religious reporter for the Dallas Morning News as well as being raised as an evangelical she was seen as an ideal person to investigate what was going on with the evangelical movement. What she found was that rather than being the powerhouse movement the media and Rove say, it is actually a religious movement that was shrinking and losing clout year by year as followers fall away. Even more surprising, she found that they never could have been the force that they claimed as they never did have the numbers reported. Here's a gist of her thesis from a sermon she quoted by Pastor Davidson Loehr, pastor at the First Unitarian/Universalist Church of Austin:

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)

The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

So not only is the Religious Right in decline it was never as strong as claimed.  Pastor Loehr points out that an astounding 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years.  And the reason:

The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world.

We have seen that a large majority of those under thirty identify as Democrats.  The base that Republicans have used to ride to victory are simply growing old and dying.  The abortion issue will no longer play like it once did.