Christians, not necessarily Democrats

My Bnet colleague David Kuo has a piece in today's NYT saying that chatterers claiming that the Evangelical vote is opening up to Democrats are premature, that there's no conclusive evidence that Evangelicals are moving toward the Dems. Instead, he says, there are signs that Evangelicals are beginning to re-examine their spiritual and political priorities, resulting in them being less intense about politics. Unless I'm mistaken, the Bnet post-election online survey David cites was voluntary, therefore non-scientific, so I don't see that data as indicating anything predictive.

Still, I hope he's right, broadly speaking. The overall message of "Crunchy Cons" -- now out in paperback, just in time for all your Thanksgiving needs (dang, no recipes!) -- is that true conservatives need to look inward and build communities and institutions that will help us to preserve in community our faith and the virtues by which we aspire to live. This doesn't mean withdrawing from politics -- I can't share David's view that Christians should "fast" from political involvement for two years -- but it does mean reprioritizing to focus our energies on family, church and building up things at the local level. Which is not actually all that different from what David proposes, I guess. I think both of us, out of our very different experiences, believe that the preoccupation many Christians have had with secular politics has been at best a distraction from more urgent tasks. Again, we come at it from different angles, but as those who've read my book know, I believe the idea that we conservative Christians are doing our part to push back hard against the spirit of the age by enthusiastically voting Republican, even as we turn ourselves and our children over to the corrupting broader culture, is foolish and dangerous. Most conservative Christians intuit this, I think, but we need to be talking more openly about this in our churches and circles of friends, and figuring out what to do.