The Twilight of the Religious Right?

It was too beautiful a day today in Chicago to stay inside and catch up on the news, so I didn't. I had a very pleasant afternoon reading a book in an outdoor restaurant. Of course, there's always time to read Frank Rich. Mr. Rich is in a more optimistic mood than he's seen in the last few weeks. In "The Passion of the Embryos," he interprets the Prez's unpopular stem cell veto and Ralph Reed's loss in the Republican primary for George lieutenant governor as indications that the religious right is losing its grip over the Republican party. Although those developments are encouraging, I'm not entirely sure that I buy the argument. Rich is right on this point, though:

That the administration's stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party's far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo's condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program's canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he's read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush's side.

That's all true enough, but I wonder if the general public sees this as an ideological issue or just a simple point on which they agree or disagree. Likewise, I'm not sure voters see Ralph Reed's fall as a strike against the religious right or simply a strike against him as an individual. Rich details his sins:

The humiliating Reed defeat — by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state — is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it's what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff's clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry — older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn't some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right's most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed's smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing "the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century."

He's right that we've seen a host of other religious leaders who've proven to be far short of what they profess over the years. I don't know whether Elmer Gantry was shocking when it was originally published, but if you watch the Burt Lancaster movie today, there's nothing surprising in the fact that he's revealed to be a total charlatan. But precisely because we're aware of such failings, I'm afraid that it's easier for us to lay the blame on the individual rather than the religious organization. Ralph Reed's hypocrisy is his own, but if you don't already have a tendency to see the religious right in the same terms, there's little reason you'll think less of them because Reed has feet of clay.

Thanks today to Welcome to Pottersville for links to the full Frank Rich column.