Weak Teavangelicals

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from In These Times:


Weak Teavangelicals
Despite great efforts, Billy Graham and his flock failed to pull out a Romney win. Is the ‘values voter’ era over?

BY Chris Lehmann


If Barack Obama’s win proves one thing, it’s that Republicans can no longer count on the religious Right shepherding its flocks to the polls to produce a GOP victory.

It’s not that evangelicals didn’t try. As the 2012 election cycle gasped and wheezed to a close, religious activists on the Right rushed to render the whole ghastly spectacle as a stained-glass diptych of a runaway secularist state facing off against an affronted-but-energized piety.

Ralph Reed’s PAC, the Faith & Freedom Coalition, dispatched some 15 million voter guides to more than 100,000 churches, urging the evangelical faithful to turn out en masse, “specifically in the battleground ‘swing states’ and districts that will decide the [election’s] outcome … and whether freedom can be saved in America.”

Billy Graham, the 94-year-old éminence grise of the evangelical movement, took out a series of full-page newspaper ads, urging readers “to vote for those who … support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman.” ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14170/weak_teavangelicals

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1. du rec. nt

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2. Wow! Check out these amazing new findings from PRRI here.

For one thing, the movement’s pet crusades—bans on abortion and gay marriage —have shown little drawing power beyond the narrow demographic of 94-year-old preachers living in the North Carolina mountains.

In a survey released this September by the Washington-based non-profit Public Religion Research Institute, white working-class Americans—i.e., wage-earning workers without a four-year college diploma, who are the traditional recruiting corps for evangelical political leaders—voiced a striking disinterest in the culture wars. Just one in 20 of the respondents to the Institute’s national phone survey reported that “either abortion (3 percent) or same-sex marriage (2 percent) is the most important issue to their vote,” while 53 percent cited the economy. And drilling down on matters of economic policy, the poll found that “white working-class Americans display a strong strain of economic populism.” Among these findings:

• 46 percent of white working-class Americans believe that capitalism is “at odds with Christian values.”

• 78 percent say that corporations that move jobs overseas are responsible for America’s economic distress.

• 62 percent favor raising taxes on households with incomes of more than $1 million a year.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Billy "Values" Graham spent 94 years railing against Mormonism as a cult then he

endorsed a Mormon, said they were NOT a cult and millions laughed in his ancient, money grubbing face. Amazing to see such an old man turn so defly on a dime. What sort of a man is Graham? Clearly a man who will spout for decades on end diatribes against millions of people when he really does not mean it at all, or a man who will endorse a polytheist cult because he's such a huge racist. I vote for 'Billy is a racist' because of all his vile anti Jewish yuck fests with Nixon.
And that's the entire Republican Party's problem as well. They think they can spew vitriolic hate for decades against minority groups then instantly be able to win minority votes by slapping on a grin and 'reaching out'.