After the carnage of Tuesday night, a lot of us–including yours truly–are still wondering, “What in the world happened?” Well, at least three religious right pundits think they have the answer: prayer.
On Sunday night, Bryan Fischer, the chief policy analyst for the American Family Association, was in Houston to cover a rally to support the pastors who were subpoenaed after their preached sermons opposing the city’s new gay rights ordinance. The rally went ahead even though the subpoenas had been withdrawn a few days earlier. On Wednesday’s edition of “Focal Point,” Fischer told a caller from Texas, “Steve,” that he was convinced the prayers offered at that rally made a difference in the election. According to Fischer, during most of the rally, the attendees were “kneeling in prayer” and “seeking God for forgiveness for themselves and for this land.” He didn’t think there was a coincidence that the GOP won a “dramatic victory” just three days after the election.
In a column for Matt Barber’s “news” site, BarbWire, conservative talk show host Laurie Roth declared that the Republican victory was nothing less than an answer to prayer. She claimed that from the very beginning, Obama has wanted to turn this country into “a socialist/communist creature that he controls.” However, Roth says, Obama reckoned without “the prayers of God’s people.” For the last six years, she has told her audience to pray that God would “save our country and fix our mess.” Tuesday’s election is, to Roth’s mind, nothing less than “the beginning of America’s miracle.”
Veteran religious right activist Ralph Reed crunched the numbers from data gleaned by his Faith and Freedom Coalition, and that something like one-third of the midterm electorate identified as conservative evangelicals. Out of that total, Reed says, a whopping 82 percent voted for Republicans. He personally thinks that massive turnout among evangelicals directly contributed to the victories of David Perdue, Joni Ernst, and Thom Tillis possible in Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina, respectively.
For all of this chest-beating, Fischer, Roth, and Reed are forgetting two things. First, while stirring up anger among social conservatives may have been enough to get the GOP over the finish line, overwhelming evidence suggests that this isn’t a good long-term strategy. The religious right is relying on turning out an audience that is getting smaller and smaller. The percentage of white evangelicals has dropped by six percent since 2007, and by seven percent over the same period in North Carolina–both well ahead of the overall national decline. And not only is it getting smaller, it’s getting older. Evangelicals make up 29 percent of seniors, but only 10 percent of millennials. If that isn’t enough to give religious right strategists severe ulcers, GenXers and millennials who identify as evangelicals are, for the most part, much more progressive than their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. It stands to reason that they would be much more inclined to at least give Democrats a fair chance–unlike their forebears, who have more or less been brainwashed into thinking Democrats are baby-killing, pro-gay libruls.
Second, history has shown that whenever the religious right thinks its hand is strong enough that it can call a favor, it almost always backfires–spectacularly. Arguably the best example of this is the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even though it was clear that there was nowhere near enough support in the Senate to remove Clinton from office, pressure from social conservatives resulted in the House voting for impeachment. What did it get them? Democrats actually picked up seats in both chambers, contrary to conventional wisdom that the president’s party loses seats in the sixth year of an administration. Additionally, the run of Republican success in the Electoral College during the 1980s masked growing discontent among moderate Republicans in the Northeast, Midwest and West with the growing rightward turn fueled by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Those areas swung hard to Clinton in 1992, and have remained part of the Democratic coalition more or less ever since–to the point that any competent Democrat starts with 245 electoral votes in the bank, and Texas and Georgia are the only reasons the GOP is still even in the game.
The bottom line? While the religious right may be spiking the football now, if current trends are any indication that ball could bounce back up and hit them smack in the mouth in 2016.
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