NYT declares Religious Right is Dead. Again

New York Times Declares Religious Right Dead. Again.
28 October 2007

By Jeff Sharlet

With "The Evangelical Crack-Up," New York Times conservative beat
reporter David D. Kirkpatrick's nearly 8,000-word cover story in this
Sunday's magazine, the paper of record has attempted to cement a new
chunk of conventional wisdom: The religious right is dead. Again.


The story is already the paper's most-emailed article, and the liberal
blog DailyKos.com has heralded it as long-awaited news -- a peculiar
memory lapse for political junkies. This isn't the first time
establishment media has declared the end of conservative
evangelicalism as a movement: It did the same in 1992, when Clinton
won; in 1996, when he won again. It declared American fundamentalism
an artifact of the past in 1925, after the Scopes Trial, and then
proceeded to ignore the build-up of a Christian conservatism that
infused the Cold War with particularly fervent anti-communism that
recognized only three shades, black, white, and red. And as recently
as 2000, too, establishment media considered fundamentalism mostly a
non-starter, at best a sideshow in the Gore-Bush contest.

Here we are again. The NYT's two reporters assigned to following the
religious right -- or, rather, the electoral fortunes of the religious
right -- have declared evangelical conservatism as dead as D. James
Kennedy and Jerry Falwell. On October 7, Laurie Goodstein weighed in
with a "Week in Review" piece titled "For a Trusty Voting Bloc, Faith
Shaken," which made the classic establishment media mistake of
reducing a social movement -- evangelicalism -- to its visible point
of contact with the concerns of establishment elites,
inside-the-beltway politics (see The Revealer, "Movements vs. Media
Narratives"). And now, Kirkpatrick issues the official word in
watercooler wisdom for political junkies: In 2004, he writes, "White
evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting
bloc in America." But today, "the movement shows signs of coming apart
beneath its leaders." ...more on link


The Revealer: <I>New York Times</i> Declares Religious Right Dead. Again.