Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel & Dimed, contributes an article to The Nation which brings up what is to my mind the most important factor of the “evangelical vote.” It has little to do with any “values” language, much to do with the creation of an alternative system for the delivery of services which competes with government.
The Faith Factor by Barbara Ehrenreich
Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you’ll find the McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the “Career Ministry”; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a “special needs” ministry for disabled children.
MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services–childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: “First, you find a church.” A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest analogy to America’s bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare state.
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Of course, Bush’s faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services; not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services–but they stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.
This is not a portrait of a ministry which fails to attend to the admonitions of the Sermon on the Mount. The offer here is temporal salvation through acceptance and submission to the Path offered within the Church. This will be abetted by the destruction of any salvation offered outside the doors of the Church. That is the danger. These groups share with Al Quaeda the goal of bankrupting the US Government. They believe that as chaos spreads without they will prosper within their own protected circle. It is much too simplistic to see these groups as ignoring the poor to their own advantage or nearsightedly dependant on the coming of the apocalypse. We learned on Election Day (whatever the final outcome) that these churches are also very good at mobilizing their members as voters.