The New Evangelicals

 Amy Sullivan, who tracks religion in American politics more closely than any other reporter I know, reports from a small evangelical college in Pennsylvania for The New Republic:

Rick Santorum has enough trouble in his reelection race. The incumbent GOP senator has trailed his opponent, Pennsylvania State Treasurer Bob Casey, by double digits almost since Casey declared his candidacy. Santorum’s campaign has been mired in questions about why Pennsylvanians pay to homeschool his six children in Virginia and about his involvement with the now-infamous K Street Project. Even Republicans have privately started to refer to Santorum’s campaign as a lost cause and are lobbying party leaders to shift money to more promising contests. Santorum surely never thought that, in the midst of all this, he’d have to worry about his vote against the 2005 Climate Stewardship Act, an effort to cap greenhouse gas emissions.

And, yet, witness the scene at Messiah College last month. If Santorum, a devout Catholic who has distinguished himself by leading the fight against so-called "partial-birth" abortion, should have felt safe in any venue in the state, it was at the tiny Christian school nestled against farmland in the rolling hills of conservative south-central Pennsylvania. But, when the college convened a screening of The Great Warming–a documentary on climate change narrated by Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves–and invited Casey and Santorum to attend a follow-up panel discussion with Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the senator declined. It was probably a wise choice. When the lights came up in the auditorium, panelist Joseph Sheldon, a Messiah biology professor, tore into the senator, accusing him of selling out the environment to business interests. Question after question from the packed hall attacked Santorum’s votes against the Kyoto Accord and for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It could have been the sort of thing that merited only a mild raise of the eyebrow–the fact that evangelicals care about the environment isn’t news anymore, and besides, everyone knows that it’s the more controversial sexual issues that drive their votes. But, in Pennsylvania, global warming is the deciding issue for some evangelicals. Both Casey and Santorum are pro-life, which neutralizes the abortion factor, and the NAE has made the Keystone State the testing ground for a new strategy–one that favors not the hot-button issues of abortion and gay marriage, which have traditionally helped Republican candidates, but other causes on the evangelical agenda that more closely track with Democratic positions. "There’s going to be a lot of political reconsideration on this in the coming year," Cizik told me. "The old faultlines are no more."

Cizik’s influence on evangelicals has been doubted by others I’ve read, but Sullivan points out later in the story:

For years, Rove and his ilk have attempted to scare up evangelical voters by crudely portraying Democrats as agents of cultural decay. Those attacks, however, will be far less effective if Democrats can point to the likes of the NAE and its ministers as proof of their faith-friendly bona fides.

If the Democrats are agents of cultural decay, in our crude politics of blaming, doesn’t that make the Republicans the agents of planetary decay?