Quote:Actually, the Wheaton article is saying what I've been saying. There is more than one definition of "Evangelical" making it hard to quantify. I feel it is dishonest to use the Gallup number which is the broadest sense, for talking about the slimmest fraction that are moral ultra-conservatives.
Well, I'm not using the Gallup number, which is 40%, approximately. I've been saying 25%, which is a much smaller number, by over 40 million people.
I have emphasized, many times, that not every Evangelical (and one could broaden this to not even every congregation) will find Romney's appeal to be convincing.
But the "moral ultra-conservatives" are not a slim fraction. They are over a quarter of all born-agains, and nearly a tenth of the population. Since around two-thirds of the voters aren't likely to vote in a Republican primary anyway, even if we just consider that group of people, ('Evangelicals' by the Barna number, 'Traditional Evangelicals' by the earlier one) that is more than enough for a candidate to bend over backwards for their support.
But they are certainly not the only ones. The voting statistics for Bush in 2000 and 2004 make it abundantly clear: the candidate who speaks the right message about Religion can carry the Evangelical vote, to the tune of nearly 85%. This is not just Jerry Falwell and his immediate crew. This is a huge swath of the voting public.
Issues that convince the hard-core Evangelicals are likely to swing the major Evangelical organizations over to one candidate. When that happens, the power of the pulpit in politics brings over a much larger, perhaps more moderate group, but in huge numbers. Not every Evangelical has to be completely over the top 700-club-crazy for a candidate to win broad Evangelical support by making appeals to the conservative wing. Those same conservatives, since they represent the largest faction of Evangelicals, control all their political apparatus.
It is perhaps telling that the only other group who votes so consistently in one direction are the African-American born-again churches, who vote almost the complete mirror image. Interesting to contemplate.
-Jester