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A friend of mine named Kent sent me a column teaser in email that he knew would get my attention.  It was the abstract of a larger article written by Georgetown professor and leftist Michael Kazin.  I know, shocking that a college professor would be a leftist.  Who would have thunk it?  I went over and read the whole piece as it appeared in the New Republic (a left wing mag).  The piece was entitled, "The End of the Christian Right."

It's funny, actually, because I've been reading a lot about the death of evangelicalism and the end of Christian America and all this stuff, from a variety of sources.  A couple of my colleagues who are evangelicals have been lamenting with me and to me quite often recently about the sorry state of evangelicalism if we as Christians are ready to champion the family values positions of men like Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump.  But Kazin's piece, obviously, took a different angle.  Far from rallying conservative Christians to hold firm to their beliefs, Kazin was taking an analytical approach, if not with an undercurrent of taunting towards those he undoubtedly looks on with disdain.

It was Kazin's contention that the Christian Right is simply losing influence and dying out in America.  And he had ample evidence to support his thesis.  Here's a sample of it:

Yes, pious conservatives earned the underfunded Rick Santorum a virtual tie in the Iowa caucuses, and, last week, a large gathering of evangelical leaders nodded fervently in his direction. Every GOP candidate still in the race speaks of Planned Parenthood as if it were a band of terrorists and vows to stop the largest and oldest reproductive rights group in the country from winning even a dollar of federal funding?and all of them except Ron Paul has signed a firm pledge to support a constitutional amendment that would essentially ban same-sex marriage. As for the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, who has earned the suspicions of many conservative evangelicals, he has worked tirelessly to ingratiate himself with the Christian Right. Pro-Romney robo-calls in South Carolina currently feature a right-to-lifer from Massachusetts who opens her pitch, "I know you have heard a lot of folks talking about Mitt's record on life, faith, and marriage while governor of Massachusetts."

 

But, whatever their influence on the Republican primary, the Christian Right is fighting a losing battle with the rest of the country?above all, when it comes to abortion and same-sex marriage, the issues they care most about. A strong majority of Americans backs abortion in the early months of a pregnancy. If elected president, it's exceedingly unlikely that Romney would ever sign legislation that could lead to the indictment of millions of women and tens of thousands of physicians for fetal murder. Last fall, even voters in Mississippi soundly rejected a bill that might have done just that.

 

Meanwhile, support for gay rights is rising, quite swiftly. Same-sex marriage tops fifty percent in some recent polls, and the remarkably placid response to New York's recent legalization of the practice will make it easier for other states to follow suit. With over two-thirds of Americans now endorsing the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the debate on that once controversial issue is now a matter for historians to analyze.

While I do think it's odd for a piece that is supposed to be telling us how weak the Christian right is becoming to begin by addressing how they are so influential they can make a moderate like Mitt pander with the best, I get Kazin's larger point.  He is saying, in essence, "conservative Christians may still hold appeal in the Republican primary, but they've lost the country."  I have my doubts about that in a country where by a two to one margin, citizens identify as conservative as opposed to liberal.  Though I haven't conducted a scientific study, something tells me that a lot more people have reservations about the normalcy of homosexual conduct than are letting on or acknowledging publicly.  You don't violate the Moral Law written upon the hearts of all men - no matter how liberal they are - without causing at least some red flags to surface in people's minds.

But what I found interesting is that though he gave lip service to the topic, Kazin spent essentially no time talking about the other hot-button issue for conservative Christians: abortion.  Now why would that be?  Perhaps because the precise opposite phenomenon Kazin praises happening with homosexuality is happening with abortion.  The pro-life movement has never been this energized, this aggressive, this confident...or this young.  That last point is an important one.  And by the way, it's not just me that thinks that.  Kazin made a big deal of that in his piece, when he was talking about other issues:

At Glenn Beck's prayer meeting cum political rally in August 2010, the average age of the participants was somewhere in the late fifties or older: White and gray hair and spreading midriffs predominated in the nearly all-white crowd. It may have been the first Washington rally in history at which a majority of the participants were resting on portable folding chairs.

 

Put simply, the Christian Right is getting old. According to the largest and most recent study we have of American religion and politics, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, almost twice as many people 18 to 29 confess to no faith at all as adhere to evangelical Protestantism.

It's interesting that Kazin would speak of the importance of youth in social crusades and yet ignore the obvious reality that the youthful pro-life movement is having untold impact on the future of this issue.  They are pushing the reality of personhood for life in the womb, which is the silver bullet that kills the monster of abortion.  If Kazin thinks that abortion will survive this generation of Americans, I think he is grossly mistaken.

But again, his larger point about the waning influence of the "Christian Right" could be correct.  I don't know.  Nobody does.  But I do know that truth exists and it is applicable.  Right is right and wrong is wrong.  I don't need polls or the support of the majoritarian politics to tell me that.  That a majority of Americans may not see the consequence of anti-family policies, that doesn't make them right.  That they may reject the general fundamentals of the Judeo-Christian ethic doesn't make it a good idea.  Kazin may be right that that is where we're headed, but he's wrong if he thinks that is a good thing.

We are in a desperate state when we are governed only by the whims of the majority.  Our Founders understood this point, which is why they relied so heavily on the supremacy of Natural Law.  It is Natural Law that has been the focal point of the Christian Right, and it is the embrace of Natural Law that will suffer if the Christian Right disappears.  While I am sure liberal journalists will celebrate their initial victory in vanquishing the influence of both in our country, history convinces me that they will come to regret it.