A Stitch in Haste

"Did you see my boy Barack today?"
--Mike Fine, 28, during a weekly Bible study meeting.

The New York Times elaborates:

The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.

They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.

"Evangelicalism is becoming somewhat less coherent as a movement or as an identity," said Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame. "Younger people don't even want the label anymore. They don't believe the main goal of the church is to be political."

The article does note, on the other hand, that the next generation of Evangelicals are not, contra young Mr. Fine, becoming Democrats. Neither are they at all becoming pro-choice — or, for that matter, particularly pro-gay. They still know an abomination when they see one.

They are, however, leaving their Republican voter registration cards at home when they go to church and leaving their fire-and-brimstone sermons home when they go to vote. They see their version of Christianity as a personal guide, not a voting guide. They recognize the difference between winning converts and winning House seats. They worry more about redeeming their own souls through good works and righteous living than about redeeming your soul or mine through theocratic lawmaking and adjudicating.

Good for them. (And better for us.)

Meanwhile, the generation gap on same-sex marriage is well documented — even the bigots acknowledge it in society at large. It even exists among conservatives themselves: "One in three under 30 favors same-sex marriage, compared with one in 10 of their elders." That is why gay marriage is of course inevitable and why the bigots were so desperate to enact as many state constitutional amendments as they could, as quickly as they could: the clock was ticking. They knew they couldn't stop the march of modernity — but they could certainly try to slow it down.

The other age-based maneuver that older Evangelicals are increasingly relying on in their futile War on Progress is of course "Christian" (i.e., redacted) homeschooling — "complete" (so to speak) with no evolution, no sex education and no "Heather Has Two Mommies." Only time will tell just how much anti-intellectual scarring there will be among the pending wave of Evangelical-indoctrinated illiterates and how they will interact, not just with the non-Evangelical real world, but also with their non-isolated "new Evangelical" brethren.

In any case, I'm glad that at least some conservatives are "tired of the culture wars." Because I am too.