"A Fading Force in American Life"?

"Put simply, the Christian Right is getting old. According to the largest and most recent study we have of American religion and politics, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, almost twice as many people 18 to 29 confess to no faith at all as adhere to evangelical Protestantism. Young people who have attended college, a growing percentage of the population, are more secular still. Catholicism has held its own only because the Church keeps gathering in newcomers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, few of whom are likely to show up at a Santorum rally. To their surprise, Putnam and Campbell discovered that conservative preachers infrequently discuss polarizing issues from the pulpit. Sermons about hunger and poverty far outnumber those about homosexuality or abortion."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic argues that the Christian Right is in decline.


"The concept of 'one nation under God' has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that 'this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.' After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal."

And Kevin M. Kruse in The New York Times depicts an early victory for "Christian libertarianism" in the 1950s.


"Yes, the warhorses of the Christian Right are showing their age, but a younger generation of culture warriors, some more radical than their elders, are just beginning to come into view. The Christian Right has been buried many times by secular observers since its advent as a powerful political movement in the late 1970s. It’s far too early to write yet another obituary."

But Ed Kilgore in The New Republic challenges Kazin.