Evangelicals and Iraq

Evangelical opinion on Iraq may have recently reached a tipping

point against the war.  In January 2005 the Pew Research Center
for the Press and the People reported that President Bush’s approval
rating among white evangelicals stood at 72% compared to 54% in March
2006.  While a number of factors could account for this decline,
reduced optimism about Iraq is certainly one of the central
reasons.  This represents a stunning reversal as white
evangelicals were among the strongest supporters of the president as
well as the invasion of Iraq.

What should we make of this about face?  First of all, it is
probably the result of the steady drumbeat of bad news from Iraq and
not the result of any great moral conversion among evangelical
elites.  Like the rest of the American public, evangelicals see
the casualty lists growing, have seen the photos from Abu Ghraib and
read about the torture at Guantanamo Bay and other sites.  The
lack of weapons of mass destruction, the fabricated link between Saddam
and al-Qaeda, and the incipient civil war are all also part of the bad
news on Iraq.

Second, the phalanx of evangelical leaders who helped whip up support
for the war have not necessarily changed their minds, they have just
changed the subject.  These leaders are canny enough politically
to sense a loser when they see one and they are not dwelling on the
carnage of Iraq.  But this vacuum in moral leadership does present
an opening for Democrats and for new indigenous leaders among various
evangelical communities to speak out.

Third, evangelical preachers seem to have behaved similarly in that I
do not hear a lot of sermons on “How I Got Iraq Wrong.”  Instead
all I hear is silence.  Churches that have a lot of military
families have their hands full dealing with casualties, the stress of
multiple deployments, and the tolls on families with a member
struggling with reentry into American society.

It is way too early to tell what the long term consequences of Iraq
will be for evangelicals, but grand political vision of a united
evangelical world supporting a global war on the axis of evil led by a
permanent Republican majority is dead — and thank God for that. 
But the time may be ripe for a couple of other consequences.  One
would be that Democrats need to recover a comfort with entering
evangelical enclaves to offer an alternative foreign policy that does
not seduce evangelicals with appeals to spreading God’s gifts to the
Muslim world through the means of armed invasion.  Democracy is
indeed a good thing, but exporting it through the barrel of gun has not
proven very effective. 

The
other consequence should be that evangelical leaders need to be
aggressively shown their collective failure in the lead up to and
conduct of the war.  There were gallant exceptions in the
evangelical world who opposed the war from the outset and their tribe
needs to increase.