Casting Stones

First of all, welcome, everyone, to our new mix-it-up, thrash-it-out politics blog. Like most of you, I’m fascinated by what is going on among conservative Christians and politics these days. I am not, however, surprised by the rift between members in the pews and those in leadership. Two reasons. Reason number one is that evangelicals,…

David, as thrilled as I was to see Bobby Jindal win as governor in my home state last weekend, I strongly caution against reading the victory as any kind of bellwether for how the 2008 vote may go for the GOP nationally. Both Jindal and the political climate in which he ran were singular. Louisiana…

“The Huckabee issue” may prove to be the final undoing of the increasingly old, tottering, out-of-touch, self-appointed evangelical mullahs. It begins with the mullahs. Keep in mind that it is this group of men – Dobson, Land, Perkins, Bauer, etc. – that demanded blind and slavish loyalty among their followers to President Bush from 1999…

(Sorry about that. What was I thinking? Back to rehab for me.) Dan, speaking as a Christian rightist, I find the travails of the Christian Right made manifest by this political year to be perhaps the biggest political story going. I’ve never been able to figure out why secular journalists pay so much attention to…

Michele, welcome to Beliefnet! It’s great having you as part of Casting Stones; we’re big fan of your Reformed Chicks blog. As for the notion that religious leaders won’t rally around Huckabee because he doesn’t have a chance, Huckabee had a great response. When a religious conservative told him that he wasn’t getting support because…

The values voters straw poll results probably reflect what’s going on in the conservative Evangelical community in general. There are some who believe that the abortion issue is so important that it trumps all other issues to such an extent that they could never vote against principle and elect a pro-choice candidate. They want to…

Even after Mike Huckabee won the Values Voter Summit’s on-site straw poll last weekend in a landslide–Mitt Romney beat him by a hair in the corresponding online poll–the Christian Right’s top leaders have refused to galvanize behind him. Has a gulf emerged between the Christian Right leadership and the evangelical rank-and-file?

Readers of my Crunchy Con blog know that I have little use for the GOP field this year, but I gotta say the more I see Mike Huckabee, the more I like and admire him. An Obama-Huckabee race in 2008 would probably be as inspiring as a Clinton-Giuliani race would be depressing. I love the…

Walking the halls at the Washington Values Voter Summit, I ran into Rev. Patrick Mahoney, a Washington-based Christian Right activist, who revealed that he had sat down with DNC chair Howard Dean last week. Mahoney, a longtime DC fixture whose advocacy and gift for offering priceless quotes often lands him in the news, says Dean…

One of the biggest faith-and-politics mysteries has been why religious conservatives haven’t rallied around Huckabee. He was told they were waiting for him to get “traction” and he said, hey you guys ARE my traction. And it’s true: if they really rallied around him in a forceful unified way, he would become a tier 1…

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