Progressives progress

"This isn't your father's Moral Majority" Bob Kemper writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

All across the country, conservative evangelicals are re-evaluating what it means to be a Christian and their soul searching, evangelical leaders and scholars say, has the potential to fundamentally reorder the federal government's priorities and trigger seismic shifts in the Republican and Democratic parties. …

The newly recognized wave of evangelical social activism remains committed to the sanctity of life, the preservation of marriage and protection of the family. But it is far more progressive socially than the Religious Right juggernaut that emerged as a conservative — and wholly Republican — political force a generation ago.

These evangelic activists believe that serving God also means acting on a "biblically balanced agenda" that would, among other things, erase poverty, trim tax cuts for the rich and protect the environment.

Somebody writes a version of this article every six months or so. When I worked for a progressive evangelical nonprofit, we used to make photocopies of them to include in our fundraisers as evidence that we weren't just spinning our wheels. We weren't, but we weren't moving ahead that much either.

Reporters like Kemper aren't wrong, exactly, there has been some progress and some movement away from the hardline partisanship of the religious right. But this progress has been glacially slow, and cherrypicking exceptions is not quite the same thing as reporting a trend.

Kemper is right that people like Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals are far more thoughtful and less partisan than godandcountry types like Jerry Falwell. And he's right that Susan Pace Hamill's attempt to revolutionize Alabama's tax code was an extraordinary, bipartisan effort that evangelical Christians can be proud of. But this extraordinary effort was also just that: extra-ordinary. And it failed. It failed, in part, due to the greater influence of the Christian Coalition of Alabama. The Ralph Reed types apparently still have more clout than the Rich Cizik types.

But baby steps. Baby steps.