David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times has been following the influence of the radical Christian right on U.S. politics for a long time. This morning, the NYT Magazine published an extremely important article from Kirkpatrick on the political evolution of the evangelical movement, and how (and why) culturally conservative church leaders are moving away from the GOP.

The essence of Kirkpatrick’s examination of this evolving phenomena can be summed up in a single sentence:

Many evangelicals feel hoodwinked and betrayed by a Republican Party propaganda machine that foisted George Bush on Christian conservatives.

A paragraph of statistics give the reader an idea of how far Bush, and by default the GOP, has fallen in the eyes of the true believers:

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent…

Submitted for your approval: it’s not just “white evangelical identification” with the GOP. The rapid dropoff in Bush’s support by the Christian conservative right is a reflection of the general mood of the nation. It’s not just a response to Bush, but a response to the state of politics in general.

While Bush’s polling numbers nationwide have plummeted into the mid-20 percentile range, the polling numbers of congress are even more abysmal. So, it’s likely that the Christian conservative dissatisfaction with Bush (and the GOP) is not so much a reflection of abandoning ideology, but abandoning principle. Failing to make a stand. Essentially, the same thing that progressives are complaining about with regards to the ineffectiveness of the 110th congress, which is controlled by the Democratic Party.

So, progressives have some common cause with Christian conservatives. Why should this surprise anyone? We’re all sick of our elected leaders not taking a stand for the values (and issues) that motivated us to put them into office.

What is perhaps most compelling about Kirkpatrick’s lengthy article is the underlying sense that Christian conservatives have become increasingly uncomfortable with the politicization of the pulpit. Thirty years ago, the worship of the deity through literal interpretation of the gospel was the centerpiece of the evangelical movement. Today, evangelicals are leaving the fundamentalist megachurches in droves because the purveyors of the gospel fancied themselves as kingmakers and legislative cultural change agents rather than preachers:

In 1991, when Operation Rescue brought its “Summer of Mercy” abortion protests to Wichita, Immanuel’s Baptist Church’s parishioners leapt to the barricades, helping to establish the city as the informal capital of the anti-abortion movement. And [Rev. Terry] Fox’s confrontational style packed ever more like-minded believers into the pews. He more than doubled Immanuel’s official membership to more than 6,000 and planted the giant cross on its roof…

So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August last year that it was his final appearance in the pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from Atlanta to Grand Rapids.

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

These days, Fox has taken his fire and brimstone in search of a new pulpit. He rented space at the Johnny Western Theater at the Wild West World amusement park until it folded. Now he preaches at a Best Western hotel. “I don’t mind telling you that I paid a price for the political stands I took,” Fox said. “The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals.” …

Christian conservative leaders such as Fox, Falwell, Dobson, Haggard, Phelps, and many of the “usual suspects” in the church have done much to turn off their constituents. While the impact of the war in Iraq was cited in the article as a major influence on the change of attitude among evangelicals, what is left unexamined by Kirkpatrick is the impact of scandals by the leaders of their own movement (such as Haggard), and the sense that they’ve been emotionally played like a cheap violin.

It’s hard to believe that there’s not a significant correlation between the emerging disaffection of movement followers, and the very public hypocrisy of the movement leaders. With the exception of fleecing the flocks for money, the leaders of the modern evangelical movement are not like their predecessors: tent revival preachers and faith healers who actually preached the word of God to their flocks.

Even more to the point, what Kirkpatrick documents is perhaps a Christian conservative recognition that there has to be a pullback from the precipice of history. In Roger K. Miller’s recent review of the new book, Wiemar Germany, he opines:

[Author Eric D. Weitz] says at the beginning of his book, “Weimar Germany still speaks to us,” and at the end, “We are drawn to the Greek tragedy of its history.” Not just because of the hyperactive vitality of its culture, but because it shows us “what can happen when there is simply no societal consensus on how to move forward and every minor difference becomes a cause of existential political battles.”

The republic was brought down, he concludes, by the determined will of the established Right (a long tradition of extreme conservatism in Germany) and the radical Right (new political organizations like the Nazis), working separately toward its destruction. But behind that, few, on the left or right, cared enough about democracy to try to make it thrive.

Indeed. And maybe there’s a little bit of this recognition beginning to slip into the existential subconsciousness of the conservative Christian movement.

Kirkpatrick’s lengthy article is well worth the read, and highly recommended. His overarching conclusion: if the GOP (and its eventual 2008 presidential nominee) is expecting a repeat of 2004’s hardcore support of the evangelical movement, they’re in a heap ‘o trouble. It’s hard to argue with that perception.