The Volume Turns Down

The Christian conservative right is in the midst of a shake out. Many are fed up with Bush and his Iraq war. The Republican Party will no longer be the sole benefactor of the Christian vote.

The bright spot with Bush turns out to be that he is so bad, he's causing fractures in his own support base of conservative Christians. Bush is a uniter, he is uniting the country against Bush.

Excellent article in the NYT: The Evangelical Crackup

'...a new generation of pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party — some as likely to lean left as right — is beginning to speak up."

Today the (Christian conservative) movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders.

Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments.

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center.

For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young...

Christianity Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent” for their swift support of invading Iraq.