The Evangelicals Behind the Velvet Curtain

According to bestselling author Christine Wicker, we've been lied to.

For years we've been told about the boundless power of the "religious right" – a supposedly homogeneous group comprised of millions and millions of vociferous and devoted evangelical Christians. Think President George W. Bush, or James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family – evangelical Christians whose opinions are heard loudly on talk radio or in the press commenting on various social issues, like abortion or same-sex marriage. Indeed, we've been told, by evangelical groups, that their numbers are, frankly, staggering – that they make up some 25% of the population, more than 50 million Americans. If true, that would make the evangelical religious right a juggernaut. But, as it turns out, there are nowhere near that many evangelicals, Wicker, a former religion reporter for The Dallas Morning News, writes in her latest book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. Based on numbers provided by the churches themselves, Wicker estimates that they're probably closer to 7 percent of the population – and their numbers are actually in decline. The evangelicals simply aren't out there saving people in droves. And that changes everything.

Wicker's book is an engrossing read, a fascinating exploration of how evangelical Christian beliefs have been hijacked by political voices – like, say, that of former Bush strategist Karl Rove – how the media allowed this to happen and, importantly, how evangelical adherence to the Bible as the inerrant word of God has pushed the faith into a corner, making it a branch of Christianity that is increasingly stuck in time, out-of-step with a changing world, and, it would seem, at least in its current form, slowly, but quite surely, fading.

Initially, Wicker didn't intend to write about any of this. In fact, she first struck out to write a more general book about the work of the nation's megachurches (think Shoreline Christian Center or Gateway). And it felt like the same old story, she said. But as she began reporting, Wicker says, people – even those in the churches – kept telling her there was another story to be told: Not a story of people coming in through the front doors, but that of those leaving through the backdoors. "[P]eople kept telling me, even in the megachurch, that what I should do is a book on how they can't save anybody," she told me recently. "I thought, what? But that's what they just kept saying to me." And so she began to poke around and, using the numbers provided by the churches themselves, Wicker stumbled upon the dirty little secret, essentially hiding in plain sight, that church membership is experiencing a serious slide. "I was astonished," she said.

How could it be that the image and the reality are so separate? In part, she says, the chasm between truth and reality was greased by the media. Instead of "chasing the numbers" and asking more critical questions, reporters by and large have merely reported what the churches and other evangelical groups (like Dobson's FOTF, for example) said about themselves. Wicker admits that as a religion reporter for the DMN she played a role in maintaining the illusion. "I knew [the numbers] were inflated grossly," she said. But at the time she didn't know how to find out exactly how they were inflated or what the reality was. And beyond that there was a question of how to incorporate that information in a news story. "[E]very time you write about it do you do a paragraph about how they cheat their numbers? No, because then you get accused of bias." And so, in time, much of the reporting on the evangelical right became dominated by press releases – containing, often, unquestioned "facts" about who the Christian evangelicals really are. That oversight has allowed the evangelical right to dominate politics and broader moral discussions – even as they are having a harder time keeping people in church. The illusion of a powerful evangelical right has "skewed" political debate and has "demoralized every other religion in America," argues Wicker.

In the end, it seems, the power of the evangelical right is more like that of the little man Oz, hiding out behind the velvet curtain. While this might be troubling to those who count themselves among the evangelical religious right, for the rest of us this revelation might be a bit more hopeful. Indeed, Wicker's work serves as a wake-up call, illustrating perfectly the principle that there is far more that unites us than divides us.

Wicker will speak Wednesday, May 21, at 6:15pm, at First Baptist Church (901 Trinity Street).