Weak Teavangelicals [View all]

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from In These Times:


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


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.” ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14170/weak_teavangelicals