We hear about the Christian Right all the time. Books are written about the danger it supposedly represents. But when I looked into it while researching The Spiritual Brain, I discovered a number of facts such as these:

… there is a widespread belief among academics (who are much less likely to be religious believers than the general public) that most evangelical Christian Americans—most of whom claim to have had [a spiritual experience]—are hard-core members of the Christian Right. Actually, as  Chip Berlet points out in The Public Eye Magazine, only 14 percent of the American electorate self-identifies as Christian Right, even though 33 percent or more, depending on the poll, considers itself “born again.” Nearly half of those who self-identified as members of the “religious right” did not even vote in the 2000 election. Black evangelicals who do vote overwhelmingly choose liberal candidates.76 The key distinctive of people who describe themselves as evangelical, charismatic, or born again is actually irrelevant to politics: it is the belief that a personal spiritual experience is essential for a meaningful life. (See also Edith Blumhofer, “The New Evangelicals,” Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2005.)

I got a chance to look at this again, listening to the punditocracy reacts to Governor Huckabee’s surprising lead in the Iowa primaries: In the wake of the Huckaboom (as well as the Obama-boom) in the US primaries in Iowa, which saw evangelical Mike Huckabee and dark horse cum rising star Barack Obama leading (when they weren’t supposed to), we can expect to see considerable obsessing in media about the prospect that the “Christian right” will act to make Republican Mike Huckabee the next US president.

You know, theocracy, the theme for thee - the theme for thee but not for me, and all that.

Actually, a reality check is long overdue. In Huckelujah Ann Coulter and in Secular left vs. Christian left Mark Steyn both make quite clear that the Huck has not been anointed a candidate simply because of his identified Christianness.

Christianity Today, the flagship publication of American evangelicals, offers some balance in an editorial, “What we really want” :

… evangelicalism doesn’t function like an AFL-CIO, granting endorsements and delivering votes on election day. There isn’t an evangelical vote. We are not some pious voting bloc up for grabs.

and

If evangelicals functioned as a voting bloc, Pat Robertson would have in 1988 soundly defeated then-Vice President George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination. But Robertson failed, as did evangelical activist Gary Bauer after him, in the 2000 presidential race.

Evangelicals, they stress, are “remarkably united” on the issues they are concerned about, as set out in a landmark National Association of Evangelicals document (2004):

freedom of religion and conscience; protection for families and children; protection of all human life, compassion and justice for poor people; global human rights; the pursuit of peace and restraint of violence; and biblically based creation care.

But evangelicals also come to different decisions about which candidate offers the best package for these concerns. For one thing, black evangelicals overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates - and Hispanic evangelicals largely do. They balance the effect of white evangelicals, who vote disproportionately for Republican ones. And that’s just the beginning of the many saw-offs that prevent the evangelical Christian community from acting as a voting bloc. (Note: I can’t yet find that CT editorial on line, which is too bad because the whole is worth reading.)

Janet Shaw Crouse offers exit polling data from Iowa:

Contrary to media coverage that assumes all Evangelicals vote alike, Evangelicals in the Iowa Caucus supported a wide range of policies and candidates. While 46 percent of Evangelicals voted for Huckabee, more than half of them (54 percent) split their vote among the four other candidates (Romney, McCain, Thompson and Paul). Huckabee benefited from the Evangelical vote, but his support was much broader and deeper than one voting segment.

So then, what are we to make of all the books obsessing about a supposed theocratic Christian right poised to take over North America? I consider these books and their readers a textbook case of displaced anxiety, a great illustration in fact for Psychology 101. After all, there are indeed violent theocrats out there who would like to abolish democracy as against God’s will and impose religious law - but (1) they are not Christians, (2) they are very dangerous to oppose, and (3) the leftists who form the bulk of the readership of anti-Christian books have pointedly refused to address the threat they represent in any realistic way. Instead, they displace their anxiety by concocting a fairytale world in which Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy (both recently deceased), and Jim Dobson are the theocrats. If only that were true. Dobson might close the local porn shop, but he isn’t going to wire a baby to blow up.

Also, today at the Post-Darwinist:

Physicists’ latest toy: The large hadron collider - gateway to other universes?

Coffee break: The Onion salutes Wikipedia!

New sci fi journal focuses on … sci phi!

Today at the Mindful Hack

Intriguing study of consensus - is it really what you think or what your buddies think?

What I say to people who think that the human mind is an illusion

Coffee break! Coffee break! Monkeys and fairness

Does behaviorism “work”?

Is emotion really better than reason in religious matters?

Is there a rock solid Religious Right vote in the United States?

Neuroscience and religion: Key medical journal prints thoughtful article

Today at The Design of Life: Can animals do math?

Weird 600-million-year-old life forms (the Avalon explosion) show that life happened but not the way Darwin thought.

Can animals do math? How much should we believe of what we read about animal number sense?

Hype aside, the evidence points away from the assumption that abstract mathematics is simply the outcome of squabbles over bones. There is a gap that is simply not bridged by the studies of animal number sense, nor do available studies shed much light on the gap.

For more, go here.

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