07/15/2008 In All posts by Christine
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield. This week, Barack Obama gave a speech about religion in which he pledged to increase funding to George Bush’s faith-based initiatives by a half a billion dollars. There was much speculation about whether it was shrewd political calculation to woo ever-important evangelical values voters.
It’s repeated widely that one in four Americans are evangelical, so it made sense for Christine Wicker, a former religion reporter for The Dallas Morning News, to write a book about this huge unified portion of the country. But as she started doing research, she was told over and over by evangelicals that she was writing the wrong book and that she should instead investigate how evangelical churches were, in fact, shrinking.
She went on to find a group that was anything but unified. Oh, and that business about evangelicals being a quarter of the population, she says it’s wrong.
CHRISTINE WICKER: What’s right is that they are seven percent of the population. I judged this every way that I could. I looked at beliefs, I looked at behavior, I looked at church attendance. And that 7 percent holds up every way you look at it. There’s only a small core of people, and they are the ones delivering the vote. That other 18 percent, it’s a swing vote.
BOB GARFIELD: Even evangelicals often have trouble agreeing on who’s who - who’s born again, who’s evangelical, who’s fundamentalist. As a practical political matter, though, versus a theological one, isn’t there enough ideology overlap among all these categories to make the number of certified evangelicals kind of besides the point?
I mean, whoever they were, did they not fuel the so-called Republican revolution and did they not sweep George W. Bush into power?
CHRISTINE WICKER: Well, Southerners have been voting Republican since Nixon. Now, once Bush came in, he began to convince us that that group of evangelicals was much larger than it was. But here’s how I usually answer that question. If that 7 percent were really as influential and big as we have been led to believe it is, if it was one out of four Americans, they would have gotten their policies passed, because politicians would be fallin’ all over themselves.
So abortion should be illegal by now. Gay rights should have been pushed back. Taxes to help the poor, social programs, all the things that they wanted should be the law of the land. But they’re not. (more…)
