To read of “robust polyphony” among evangelicals was especially welcome to me, as I addressed this phenomenon in a recent ethnography, Emerging Evangelicals (NYU Press, 2011). As a cultural anthropologist, I explored the identities fashioned, practices performed, histories claimed, institutions created, and critiques waged among evangelicals influenced by the Emerging Church movement. Pally’s astute analysis returned me to a question I stopped short of fully developing: does fragmentation equal change?

While it is clear that evangelicalism is diversifying, it is unclear what this amounts to. We see voting blocs split, financial donations broaden, volunteer labor disperse, and moral-political agendas expand. But, do these fragmentations signal tectonic, hard-wired, all-bets-are-off cultural change? Or, is it more superficial (which is not to say unimportant or not deeply felt) social change? Do electoral politics and other shifting forms of activism amount to fundamental change, or merely changing patterns of action?

Briefly, consider one example: evangelical anti-human trafficking campaigns. This is not an example Pally cites, but it exemplifies her point about a diversifying consciousness. Evangelicals, in step with other faith-based and secular actors, are devoting increasing attention to the global problem of labor and sex trafficking. A thorough canvassing of evangelical anti-trafficking would be most welcome: how many organizations exist, how much money they raise, where in the world they work, and so forth. But, the more vital qualitative question is what cultural materials evangelicals use to conceptualize and conduct anti-trafficking activism. Consider a representative organization. Unearthed, a film ministry founded in 2009, culminates its lead documentary with: “Even if we were to rescue every victim of sex trafficking today, there’s still gonna be a demand for millions and millions and millions of new slaves tomorrow. Because at the root of sexual exploitation is a demand, and it’s driven by men. If we want to change this thing systemically, if we want to stamp it out at the root, what men want at the deepest level, like their hearts and their desires, have to be changed.”

Does this hint at a profoundly different evangelicalism? I would say ‘no,’ because the organizing cultural logic is individualist, moralist, and male-centered. Unearthed relies on a thin model of agency. If men stop masturbating to pornography, going to strip clubs, and paying prostitutes for sex, then human trafficking will grind to a halt. Females – and, strikingly, a wide range of females – have little to no agency: an adult exotic dancer and a 10-year old sex slave are imagined as much the same. Moreover, the structures that create the conditions for and reproduce trafficking are systematically undervalued in the discourse of organizations like Unearthed. Global poverty, hunger, labor demands, punitive and legal policy, and transnational migration routes are scarcely mentioned or completely absent.

The fragmenting of evangelical activism is undeniably important. However, we must be cautious in what we make of it. As the case of anti-trafficking suggests, it would be easy to mistake a “new” evangelical cause for a “new” evangelicalism. We need clear theories of cultural change to make proper sense of shifting ground. What kind of re- project are we witnessing: a re-organizing of existing evangelical culture, or a re-making?

Back in the late 1970s, a group of ambitious Southern Baptist pastors launched a culture war on two fronts—against the moderates in their own Southern Baptist denomination and against the liberals they feared were contaminating America culture. Their goal was to take both back for God. As leaders of the largest Protestant group in the US and the dominant faith group in the South, those Southern Baptist leaders were one of the driving forces behind the rise of the religious right, which helped created the Republican dominance in the South.

Yet some of these Southern evangelicals are also among the “new evangelicals” described by Marcia Pally. And they are not easy to pigeonhole.

Younger Baptist leaders like Platt still vote Republican. They still want to restrict abortion and continue to believe that gay marriage is wrong. They believe their view of faith—that Jesus is the only way to salvation—is the only true way. But they have no interest in becoming the new leaders of Red America or in building denominational kingdoms. These pastors and their follower are less likely to aspire to political power and personal gain, because they’ve found those things wanting. Instead they really do aspire to change the world—by volunteering in orphanages overseas, starting charities, drilling wells, adopting orphans from overseas, establishing churches, and setting up Bible study groups to draw their peers closer to faith.

They are suspicious of government programs, preferring hands-on approaches to dealing with issues such as poverty, homelessness, and the lack of clean water. They are willing to support some unexpected programs—for example, pressure from evangelicals led former President George W. Bush to spend more money on fighting the AIDS epidemic than any of his predecessors. And while they do want people to have access to health care, they are uncompromising in their refusal to go along with policies that they feel violate their principles. A clear example of this was the legal challenge to the so-called contraceptive mandate. A number of evangelical colleges, which would otherwise support health care reform, have sued to block the Obama administration from enforcing that mandate.

How these new evangelicals fit into today’s red state blue state, culture war divide, remains to be seen.

As Pally notes here and in her book, The New Evangelicals, it is not accurate to say that the diversity of evangelical politics and public engagement is some kind of new trend. What is actually the historical aberration is the way a distinguished global movement within Protestant Christianity that has always had diverse politics got swept into the Republican Southern Strategy of the Nixon years and beyond. It is a terrible historical accident that the movement that gave us the abolitionist William Wilberforce and the firebrands of the early Social Gospel movement became identified, after 1972, with reactionary white right-wing politics in the American South.

Evangelicalism is best understood as a global renewal movement within Christianity. An evangelical is someone with a passionate love for Jesus Christ, a commitment to the authority of the Bible, an embrace of some version of historic Christian orthodoxy, a desire to spread their faith through word and deed, and a hunger to see this world become what God intended it to be from the beginning. Evangelicals have included confessional Lutherans, ardent Calvinists, reformist Methodists, pacifist Anabaptists, liberationist African-Americans, and tongue-speaking Pentecostals, among many others.

There is no intrinsic reason why a theological-pietistic movement of this type should have a particular shared politics and certainly not a particular shared conservative politics in the US. Even a cursory tour of today’s global evangelicalism reveals all kinds of political affinities and activist commitments, as Pally argues in her essay.

I suggest that what is really happening is that the odd disturbance of global evangelicalism by right-wing Southern Strategy American politics is an aberration that has not quite run its course but is beginning to weaken. What is emerging instead is the robust political polyphony that was there all along. The politicized parachurch lobbying groups of right-wing evangelicalism are weakening relative to the educational, congregational, and missional efforts that have shaped a healthier evangelical public ethic for decades and will do so well into the future.

Many have taken this as an opportunity to reflect on the fate of the Christian Right, a complex coalition of cultures that has constituted the most powerful expression of American political religion of the last thirty years. D. Michael Lindsay’s recent contribution is a sharp analysis of the organizational shifts—in the recent past and the likely near future—among evangelicals, conservative and otherwise. And his ruminations about the coming shapes of conservative Christianities in America seem to me to be spot on (I share his expectation of Bobby Jindal’s ascendancy, for what it’s worth).

These kinds of measurement tools and transformations (those occurring among leaders and public organizations) are well worth monitoring, of course. But, if we seek to track possible change, we must look also to a certain kind of enduring culture of complaint, one that has been sustained not just in conversations surrounding the unceasing campaign cycle but also in persistent exchanges that grow louder near elections, mutterings and complaints that are amplified in the resonance chambers of American public life. The “conceptual grammar” of religion discourse in public life has been shaped—broadly since the 1970s and explicitly since the 2000 elections—by the categories “bigotry,” “oppression,” and “victimhood.” These tropes are not exhaustive of conversations about religion and politics, but they have emerged as powerful indices of claims to political authenticity that depend on the languages of combat, resentment, and violence.

This critical mode has long animated and sustained portions of conservative religious culture (exemplified but not limited to Christian Right politics), but it is also part of a broader context which nurtures such resentments. In the broadest historical sense, such discourses and sensibilities partake of familiarly American forms of demonology. More specifically, their origins are located partly in what Michael Sandel calls the “recrudescence of virtue”: “the attempt, coming largely but not wholly from the right, to revive virtue, character-formation, and moral judgment as considerations in public policy and political discourse.”

Since the flowering of identity politics beginning in the 1970s, and the reemergence of heavily politicized conservative Christianities during this same period, these moral considerations have reached their apotheosis in constructions of “religion” as a political force through recourse to the languages of violence and oppression. Both advocates and critics of politically engaged Christianities have invoked these categories as a means to establish political legitimacy. These tropes have been invoked consistently to shape a specific religio-political identity through symbolic and rhetorical constructions of an Other. Those who speak this language suggest that they are an “embattled majority,” representatives of a “real” America undone by interlopers. Such protestations—from powerful institutions and heavily-funded individuals, in mass media, and in the 2008 campaign—posit that Christians are victims of “religious bigotry,” an unjust marginalization of the “faithful” from public life at the doing of secular liberals, activist judges, and Hollywood elites, among others, who oppose America’s Christian heritage. Over decades, a narrative has been advanced to suggest that a purported Golden Age in the mid-twentieth century had been disrupted by hostile “elites” and antagonists, and by assertions that America’s true heritage and true citizens needed to “take back” the mantle of legitimacy by reasserting their authority and their values against those who would make them victims of illegitimate taxation, immoral legislation, and selective use of the discourses of rationality and neutrality.

Naturally this is far from the only public Christian narrative advanced during this period, nor even the only conservative Christian one. But it has been powerful, influential, and enduring. Nietzsche famously described how those who perceive themselves as “victims” use this status to become oppressors and “killers” themselves. Political theorist Wendy Brown writes, in States of Injury, that politicized identities depend on ideals of inclusiveness “as well as their exclusion from it, for their own continuing existence.” In like fashion, contemporary uses of categories like victimization and oppression shape an orientation to public life that privileges combat rather than conversation, where Others are posited as those whom we must domesticate via the exercise of power, where laments replace deliberation. As Jeffrey Stout writes, “the expression of anger, grief, and disappointment is essential to democratic politics.” While such expressions are recognizable parts of American history, as are various strains of demonology, the construction of enemies and victims has increasingly become a surrogate for deliberation. The more such themes are articulated, the greater the shift away from shared institutions and mutual investment in the democratic process in favor of a language of scorn, persecution, and triumphalism, traits manifested in expressions as disparate as talk radio, home school curricula, and James Dobson’s fearful letter from 2012.

So as we look to the future, it is the health of this narrative, this tendency I will be watching. There is little evidence that the power of such claims will abate. While Sarah Palin’s or Samuel Wurzelbacher’s articulations thereof may not have yielded electoral votes, part of the power of these claims—and those like them, issued by different constituencies—is that they are nurtured in a context shaped by the absence of reasoned discourse and historical vision. Something about the surrealism of this unreason is captured in Jodi Dean’s writings about alien abductee claims: “Their efforts to defend themselves become further manifestations of the virtuality of contemporary reality.” Similarly, no corrections to accusations of palling around with terrorists or socialism can really be effective, since they are always announcing themselves in a context which defeats them, which contextualizes them as yet more chatter, and where to chatter is to be guilty of protesting too much. It seems, at times, that one can only add to the din. Political power is achieved through volume and repetition rather than suasion.

So while we may see a shift in representative figures, a recalibration of strategies, and so forth, the larger political context will likely prove far more intransigent, unless and until the quality of public discourse and participation changes. I expect that the rhetorics of embattlement and violence will remain powerful, and their clangor lively in the resonance chambers of American public life. And yet this moment may also become what Robert Orsi calls an “abundant event,” “characterized by aspects of the human imagination that cannot be completely accounted for by social and cultural codes.” It is possible that, despite how overdetermined Obama as signifier has already become, his presence in American public life may yet become some kind of countersign to the drab, cranky tendencies that have flourished these last decades, like embers rekindled from earlier moments in American demonology. Perhaps just the further cooling of these embers might be enough to restore lost faiths.

Hidden from most of the electorate, Obama’s theological inclinations are well known to scholars of American religion. Heralding a “civil religious revival,” sociologist R. Stephen Warner cites Obama’s belief in the power of ideals to draw Americans “toward their better natures” and the “awesome God that he knows is worshiped in both blue and red states.” Philip Gorski articulates a similar argument on The Immanent Frame, pointing to the prominence of racial reconciliation in Obama’s religious speech.

Warner and Gorski are right to focus on the motif of reconciliation. From Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic convention to Tuesday’s victory speech in Grant Park, he has sought to heal the divisions between right and left, religious and secular, Red and Blue. Like the “Rednecks for Obama” bumper stickers in the Missouri Ozarks, Obama’s claim to “worship an awesome God in the blue states,” transcends the polarizations of American culture.

In the classic typology of literary genres, Obama’s vision of reconciliation could be described as comic.  As Northrop Frye writes in Anatomy of Criticism, “the theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it.” In Barack Obama’s case, the central character is often Barack Obama. In his landmark speech on race, Obama called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” Rather than disowning the Reverend Wright and his white grandmother, he portrayed them as integral to his sense of self.  As he told the audience in Philadelphia, “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Comic rhetoric also saturates The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s bestselling chronicle on remaking America.  Proposing “a new kind of politics,” he suggests “how we might move beyond our divisions,” praising those who have been able to “make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.”  At its heart, such rhetoric is implicitly theological.  According to Hayden White, the trope of comedy “suggests the possibility of liberation” from the effects of the Fall.  In Obama’s case, such comic sensibilities are rooted in the theological virtue of hope.

Filled with comic hope, Obama’s public theology is also self-consciously ironic, drawing on the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.  Part of a “Niebuhr revival” in American politics, Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.”  In an interview with David Brooks, Obama summarized Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, accepting “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world,” and that “we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.”

Most of the time, politicians apply Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought to foreign policy, where it is associated with the realist school of international relations. This is certainly true for Obama, who believes in the judicious use of American power.

Yet Niebuhr’s Christian realism may be even more useful on the domestic front.  In his quest to unify Americans, Obama should remember that even virtuous crusades can have unintended consequences. Though he entered presidential politics to heal the nation’s political divisions, it is possible that his election may exacerbate them.

While Barack Obama has high approval ratings, a minority of Americans continue to fear and loathe him. According to Wednesday’s USA Today/Gallup poll, 27 percent of the country is afraid of an Obama presidency.  Pre-election polls in Kentucky and Texas found that between 14 and 23 percent of the public believes he is a Muslim (and many of those people associate Islam with evil).

Before and after the election, the religious right has been unrelentingly hostile to an Obama candidacy.  In particular, recent statements by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson reveal an unbridgeable chasm between Obama and some conservatives. In October 2008, Dobson released what he called a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America.” A fictional letter from the future, it begins with the author lamenting the fact that he “can hardly sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ any more.” Downright apocalyptic, it warns that an Obama administration will result in the outlawing of campus ministries, a rise in pornography, the banning of evangelical books, and the outlawing of the Pledge of Allegiance. Along the same lines, Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery compares Barack Obama to “pagan rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, and Cyrus.” Such polarizing rhetoric suggests Obama may have trouble transcending the politics of Red States and Blue States.

And yet it appears that Obama knows exactly what he is up against.  Consistent with his Niebuhrian sensibilities, he has not portrayed the quest for reconciliation as an easy journey. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama believes that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that a new kind of politics requires us “to account for the darker aspects of our past.”

On Tuesday night, Obama looked back to a dark time in American history, quoting Abraham Lincoln’s words “to a nation far more divided than ours”:  We are not enemies but friends.

James Dobson notwithstanding, there are signs that religious conservatives are beginning to get the message. Though more evangelicals voted for Barack Obama than for John Kerry, an overwhelming majority supported John McCain.  Knowing this about his flock, Assemblies of God General Superintendent George Wood issued a post-election statement.  Noting that “we are to show respect for those who hold office,” he said that “the recent campaign at all levels and all parties was often filled with bitter rancor, distortions, smears and lies.” According to Wood, we must “set a better tone for the national discussion.” Though such words are all too rare, they suggest that Barack Obama may yet achieve his dream of a new kind of politics.

Certainly, personal interaction with the president raises the stock of an evangelical leader.  The late Jerry Falwell often let it be known that President Reagan personally called him when the president nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court.  That one presidential gesture in 1981 validated Falwell’s claim to authority, even though he was just one of many figures vying to lead the evangelical movement in the early 1980s.

So who will President-Elect Obama turn to when he wants to hear what the evangelical community is thinking?  As has been the case with President Bush, he will first turn to members of his own administration who are evangelical.  I expect Burns Strider, who once led religious outreach in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, will serve somewhere, most likely in the office of public liaison.  This is the office that was institutionalized by Presidents Nixon and Ford as a way of maintaining regular contact with core constituencies.  There has been a person in this office tasked with religious outreach for over three decades.  No one in the Democratic Party has done a better job reaching out to evangelicals in recent years than Strider, and although they were not on the same team in the primary season, I expect President-Elect Obama will count on him.  I interviewed Strider three years ago while researching Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.  Even then, it was apparent that Strider was laying the groundwork for a religiously-inspired movement that would engage political liberals and moderates, thereby forcing pundits to specify more clearly what is meant by “values voters.”

There are also high-profile evangelical pastors who will have the president’s ear.  Both Joel Hunter and Kirbyjon Caldwell publicly supported George W. Bush in 2004 and then backed Barack Obama in 2008.  Hunter leads a church in Orlando and delivered the benediction on the closing night of this year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver.  Caldwell pastors Windsor Village United Methodist Church, the largest United Methodist congregation in North America, and frequently participated in conference calls with the Obama campaign.

What Happens to the Religious Right?

Is the Obama presidency the final nail in the coffin for the Religious Right?  Don’t count on it.  For one thing, political movements like the Religious Right don’t need a “god” to succeed, but they do need a devil.  Nothing builds allegiances among a coalition like a common enemy.  Within the first few days of the new administration, the White House will reverse the so-called “Mexico City Policy” that bans all non-governmental organizations receiving federal funding from performing abortions in other countries.  President Clinton repealed this policy, first enacted by President Reagan and continued with President George H.W. Bush, on his first day in office in 1993.  In 2001, President George W. Bush reenacted the policy upon entering the White House.  The policy has become a political hot potato.  Shortly after the inauguration, President-Elect Obama will, no doubt, repeal the policy and thereby reinvigorate the Religious Right, for whom abortion remains the defining policy issue.

All the while, speculation continues on who will be the new standard bearer for the Religious Right.  Although Sarah Palin charmed this core constituency of the Republican Party, don’t expect her to become their public face.  Evangelicals have too much political savvy for that.  Just as they distanced themselves from Dan Quayle in the 1990s, so also will evangelicals move away from Governor Palin, despite her charisma.  Certainly, she will remain in the public eye, maybe complete with her own television show.  But she has never been able to articulate a religiously-inspired vision for public policy in the way that Phyllis Schlafly or Tony Perkins—both stalwarts of the Religious Right—have.

It is possible that Mike Huckabee may lead the Religious Right.  Like Charles Colson, Huckabee has actual government experience and shares with Colson a unique blend of theological insight and political acumen.  But the former governor of Arkansas will have to decide if he wants to be a contender for the Republican nomination in 2012.  If so, he will spend much more energy building relationships with fiscal conservatives (who did not support him in 2008) than deepening friendships with fellow social conservatives.

A more likely choice is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.  His conservative credentials are unassailable with a 100% pro-life voting record according to the National Right to Life Committee and consistent opposition to embryonic stem cell research.  He converted to Catholicism after being raised in a Hindu family, and he served as an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the first term of George W. Bush’s administration.  A former Rhodes Scholar, Jindal was rumored to be the front-runner to join John McCain’s presidential ticket earlier this summer.  As the first Indian-American governor in U.S. history, Jindal would represent, quite literally, a new face for the Religious Right.

Whatever happens in the months ahead, three things are certain.  A new cohort of public figures will emerge, each claiming to represent American evangelicals.  President-elect Obama will appoint a few of them to his administration, but none to high office.  Second, the public disdain for the evangelical “brand” will subside a good bit as Bush-era religious conservatives fade from attention.  Finally, by next fall, the Religious Right will solidify its support behind two or three newer figures as they seek to remake the movement’s public image.