RE: Evangelicals and the GOP

I don't see what the BBC has to do with any of this.

I guess the main problem would be with how the BBC (and much of the rest of the press) portrays evangelicals. The first problem is that it is a self-applied name and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The BBC tends to lump organizations like the FRC, Focus On The Family, and whatever Pat Robertson is calling his circus lately under the general heading of evangelicals. In general, the term is used to apply to "conservative" Christians.

So they report:

At a news conference in Washington, some of America's most influential conservative leaders said the current perception among evangelical Christians was that the Republican majority was not doing enough for them.

Yet they decline to identify these "most influential conservative leaders" by name. Immediately after that, they cite the example of "banning homosexual marriages," a hot-button topic couched in provocative language. All evangelicals become lumped together with the core of cultural brownshirts, completely ignoring the sizeable portion of evangelicals who would actually prefer that the government get out of the business of regulating marriage altogether. The BBC could have referred to abortion or welfare or forced charity, all concerns of evangelicals, but they chose instead to pick an issue with the most emotional content for their liberal audience.

I distinctly recall how much God and Country were dramatically tied together by Bush since 9/11 to better sway patriotic evangelical Americans — which there are many — towards supporting the war.

Oh, but you did assume. You assumed Bush's God and Country rhetoric was what spurred evangelicals to support his war effort. As I said before, many evangelicals supported the war for the same reason that many Jews, atheists, and yes, even liberals supported the war: they believed Bush when he said Iraq was a threat. Your implication is that evangelicals are gullible when someone waves a bible and a flag in front of their faces. There is simply no evidence to support the idea that evangelicals favored Bush's war plans in any greater percentage than any other demographic group.

Sorry, that's just my style. Kidding.

You have an odd sense of humor. "Crusading against homosexuals" is pretty incendiary language. It's not generally associating with kidding, so I apologize for missing the intonation.

Keep in mind that there were probably equal numbers of evangelicals who didn't vote for Bush so much as they voted against John Kerry. Whatever they might have thought about Bush's motivations for social change, they had no illusions about Kerry's. The same applies to 2000 and Algore. I know dozens of conservative Christians who held their noses to vote for Bush in 2004, simply because John Kerry so obviously pandered to a degenerate social demographic.