Amy Sullivan has a piece in Washington Monthly called "When Would Jesus Bolt?" It’s about growing strain between the evangelical Christian community and the Republican Party for which it has so long been a loyal foot soldier. There’s lots of juicy stuff in the piece, but Gristies will be particularly intrigued to hear some of the backstory surrounding last month’s climate declaration by evangelicals:
In early January, I talked to Cizik about his efforts to get evangelicals to take a stand on climate change, a move that would place considerable political pressure on the administration to take the problem seriously. The NAE represents 52 denominations with 45,000 churches and 30 million members across the country — getting them all to agree on something is no easy task, but Cizik had made impressive strides and was optimistic. Convinced that his only course of action was to work with Republicans, he spent an hour patiently explaining why evangelicals were better off trying to change Republican attitudes about the environment rather than working with Democrats who already embraced his position. Not able to help myself, I argued back. It’s not as if the Bush administration doesn’t support environmental policies because they hate trees. It’s because they have powerful business supporters who don’t like regulation. Still, Cizik held firm, insisting that evangelicals had to change “our own party.”
A month later, I ran into Cizik at the National Prayer Breakfast. That morning, he had opened up his Washington Post to find an article based on a letter to his boss from the old guard — Dobson, Colson, Wildmon, and the rest — suggesting, in the way that Tony Soprano makes suggestions, that the NAE back off its plan to take a public position on global warming. “Bible-believing evangelicals,” the letter-writers argued, “disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.” The leaked letter was a blatant attempt to torpedo Cizik’s efforts, and it had worked. The NAE would take no stand on climate change.
There was no doubt that the administration had prevailed on the more pliable figures of the Christian Right to whack one of their own. Cizik was beside himself. It was hard to resist the “I told you so” moment, and I didn’t. But when I suggested to him that this was an example of the way that business seemed to win out most of the time when religious and business interests came into conflict in GOP politics, he stopped me. “Not most of the time,” he corrected. “Every time. Every single time.” And he’s no longer sure that can change. “Maybe not with this administration…. We need to stop putting all of our eggs in one basket — that’s just not good politics.”
Worth reading the whole thing.
