I'm back in blog-action, with a long-winded post about evangelicals and politics to prove it

Long time, no blsee. In the last week, I've completed my move from Washington, DC to Saint Paul, MN, with time in between to spend a few day with my brothers in Wisconsin and to meet a beautiful new baby born to friends in Chicago.

Meanwhile, looks like the non-third-party-threatening religious right leaders disagree about which GOP frontrunner is least bad but, Rick Scarborough excepted, agree that a long-shot SOUTHERN BAPTIST PASTOR somehow Sucksabee.

"Long shot?" you may ask. "Huckabee's polling second in Iowa. Why aren't these guys supporting him?" In particular, you might question, as Gail Collins does, why Pat Robertson--who holds more-lunatic-than-Jerry-Falwell unusual views on, among other things, 9/11--is supporting Rudy Giuliani. Collins:

Now this is the part that I have never been able to get. When did government spending become part of the divine agenda? Is there something in the Bible about smiting down federal bureaucrats?

Oh, Gail. How quaint to assume that religious right heavyweights look primarily to the Bible for guidance! They don't NEED to read it; they've long since memorized the verses that matter.

The reason Mike may be out of Luckabee with God's Bullies has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with their unholy alliances with the neocon establishment, and, especially, the free-market and small-government fundamendalists. Huckabee may talk a pretty good tough-on-terror game, but I'm pretty sure he's never...happened to be the mayor of a city on the day it was attacked. But it's especially his populist streak that makes these guys keep their distance.

The WSJ and the Dallas Morning News each have fairly predictable gosh-this-means-there's-a-split-among-evangelicals pieces (I think these are written by computer software by now, like Bob Herbert's columns). But as Amy Sullivan and others have been saying for awhile, the evangelical split that will matter in the election is not between conservatives and moderates or even between hardliners and pragmatists. It's between the religious right big shots--the people who endorse and anti-endorse candidates but most (not all) of whom don't have and have never had formal, church-based authority--and the people in the pews.

Why should average evangelicals be beholden to the fiscal conservatives if they don't want to be? They know how to read their Bibles. In fact, they're the theological inheritors of the most reductive distilled version of the Reformation values of local autonomy and sola scriptura. If they disagree with those who claim to speak for them, most of them don't need to go through a long and painful process of re-aligning themselves with different leaders, perhaps thousands of miles away. All they have to do cancel their Focus on the Family subscription, stop responding to Family Research Council action alerts, and practice that great and terrible evangelical tradition of reading the Bible for themselves.

Richard Land--of the SBC and thus an exception to the rule of non-church-based religious right leadership--understands this. The otherwise dull Morning News piece includes this great bit:

Mr. Land has not endorsed anyone.

"No one can deliver evangelical voters to the candidate but the candidate," he said. "They have a way of deciding for themselves."

I've long been skeptical of the evangelical-crackup narrative, as I don't feel we've seen much significant evidence of the reach of various moderating/broadening influences. But I'm more hopeful about this than I've been in the past. And, while this is about far more than electoral politics, I do think that some of the evidence will be in the future fortunes of the Huckabee campaign after losing some major endorsements (though, importantly, not all to the same rival). It's a blow that he didn't get Brownback's and Weyrich's endorsements--the value of Robertson's is at this point debatable, a subject I won't take up in this already-too-long post--but it's too soon to say that Huckabee's chances with evangelical voters are Hucked.