From In These Times: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14170/weak_teavangelicals
Despite great efforts, Billy Graham and his flock failed to pull out a Romney win. Is the ‘values voter’ era over?
BY Chris Lehmann
November 14, 2012
If Barack Obama’s win proves one thing, it’s that Republicans can no longer count on the religious Right shepherding its flocks to the polls to produce a GOP victory.
It’s not that evangelicals didn’t try. As the 2012 election cycle gasped and wheezed to a close, religious activists on the Right rushed to render the whole ghastly spectacle as a stained-glass diptych of a runaway secularist state facing off against an affronted-but-energized piety.
Ralph Reed’s PAC, the Faith & Freedom Coalition, dispatched some 15 million voter guides to more than 100,000 churches, urging the evangelical faithful to turn out en masse, “specifically in the battleground ‘swing states’ and districts that will decide the [election’s] outcome … and whether freedom can be saved in America.”
Billy Graham, the 94-year-old éminence grise of the evangelical movement, took out a series of full-page newspaper ads, urging readers “to vote for those who … support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman.”
Graham placed the ads after meeting with Romney and vowing, “I’ll do all I can to help you.” (Just in case there might be any lingering doubt about Graham’s agenda, the keepers of his eponymous website carefully excised a prior mention of Mormonism in an entry on illegitimate non-Christian “cults” shortly after Graham’s sit-down with the Mormon candidate.)
Yet all this hurried sanctimony in the house of conservatism may have been mere sound and fury. Long-term trends in opinion polling suggest that the evangelical Right would have been hard-pressed to repeat the Kulturkampf clamor to the ballot box that Reed famously engineered to help George W. Bush over the top in 2004. For one thing, the movement’s pet crusades—bans on abortion and gay marriage—have shown little drawing power beyond the narrow demographic of 94-year-old preachers living in the North Carolina mountains.
Continue reading at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14170/weak_teavangelicals
