http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28Evangelicals-t.html

The Evangelical Crackup

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: October 28, 2007

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist
Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a
neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and
pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has
long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel
has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more
than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry
Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State the
public face of the conservative Christian political
movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox
roared down from Immanuel's pulpit about the wickedness
of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized
hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state
constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to
unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His
Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of
listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday
nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, Answering
the Call. Major national conservative Christian groups
like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the
Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its
North American Mission Board.

For years, Fox flaunted his allegiance to the Republican
Party, urging fellow pastors to make the same
"confession" and calling them "sissies" if they didn't.
"We are the religious right," he liked to say. "One, we
are religious. Two, we are right."

His congregation, for the most part, applauded. Immanuel
and Wichita's other big churches were seedbeds of the
conservative Christian activism that burst forth three
decades ago. In the 1980s, when theological
conservatives pushed the moderates out of the Southern
Baptist Convention, Immanuel and Fox were both at the
forefront. In 1991, when Operation Rescue brought its
"Summer of Mercy" abortion protests to Wichita,
Immanuel's parishioners leapt to the barricades, helping
to establish the city as the informal capital of the
anti-abortion movement. And Fox's confrontational style
packed ever more like-minded believers into the pews. He
more than doubled Immanuel's official membership to more
than 6,000 and planted the giant cross on its roof.

So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August
last year that it was his final appearance in the
pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from
Atlanta to Grand Rapids. Fox told the congregation that
he was quitting so he could work full time on "cultural
issues." Within days, The Wichita Eagle reported that
Fox left under pressure. The board of deacons had told
him that his activism was getting in the way of the
Gospel. "It just wasn't pertinent," Associate Pastor
Gayle Tenbrook later told me.

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in
the pews, but he was stunned that the church's lay
leaders had turned on him. "They said they were tired of
hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about
all this political stuff!" he told me on a recent Sunday
afternoon. "And these were deacons of the church!"

These days, Fox has taken his fire and brimstone in
search of a new pulpit. He rented space at the Johnny
Western Theater at the Wild West World amusement park
until it folded. Now he preaches at a Best Western
hotel. "I don't mind telling you that I paid a price for
the political stands I took," Fox said. "The pendulum in
the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point
of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals."

Fox is not the only conservative Christian to feel the
heat of those battles, even in - of all places -
Wichita. Within three months of his departure, the two
other most influential conservative Christian pastors in
the city had left their pulpits as well. And in the
silence left by their voices, a new generation of
pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party -
some as likely to lean left as right - is beginning to
speak up.

Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative
Christian political movement could almost see the
Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like
perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They
turned out for President George W. Bush in record
numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of
four to one. Republican strategists predicted that
religious traditionalists would help bring about an era
of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the
Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of
"values voters." James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus
on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at
least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President
Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from
answering the prayers of evangelical activists by
overturning Roe v. Wade.

Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath
its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008
Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to
President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful,
although it would be hard to find a cast of characters
more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city
mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping
Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade
known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson
and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply
that the Democratic presidential front-runners - Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former
Senator John Edwards - sound like a bunch of tent-
revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system
of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of
theologically conservative Christians plunging into
political activism on the right is, historically
speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals
shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after
the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the
ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and
the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new
megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying
cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family.
Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear
the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love
affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over
the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic
accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has
sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world
- over the evangelical alliance with the Republican
Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and
between the generations.

The founding generation of leaders like Falwell and
Dobson, who first guided evangelicals into Republican
politics 30 years ago, is passing from the scene.
Falwell died in the spring. Paul Weyrich, 65, the
indefatigable organizer who helped build Falwell's Moral
Majority and much of the rest of the movement, is
confined to a wheelchair after losing his legs because
of complications from a fall. Dobson, who is 71 and
still vigorous, is already planning for a succession at
Focus on the Family; it is expected to tack toward the
less political family advice that is its bread and
butter.

The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that
expunged political and theological moderates from the
Southern Baptist Convention are retiring or dying off,
too. And in September, when I called a spokesman for the
ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James Kennedy,
another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I
learned that Kennedy had "gone home to the Lord" at 2
a.m. that morning.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors -
including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and
Bill Hybels - are pushing the movement and its theology
in new directions. There are many related ways to
characterize the split: a push to better this world as
well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual
growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no
moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus'
teachings about social justice as well as about personal
or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the
result is a new interest in public policies that address
problems of peace, health and poverty - problems, unlike
abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right
compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has
emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical
leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian
conservative political movement. "The quickness to arms,
the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of
desertion of what has been known as the Christian
right," Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now
includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer.
"People who might be called progressive evangelicals or
centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real
awakening."

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