The New Evangelicals.

Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. In their own gatherings, they proposed such things as the abolition of the capital-gains tax, a war on radical Islam, and an end to the "myth of separation" between church and state, but they concentrated their public campaigns on gay rights and abortion, the two issues that have resonated most strongly with evangelicals and helped to bring them into the Republican Party. Under the leadership of James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and others, including Richard Land, the official in charge of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, activists organized "values voters" with the help of ballot initiatives in eleven states for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. In November, all the initiatives passed, and George W. Bush took seventy-eight per cent of the white evangelical vote--a record for a Presidential candidate. Because evangelicals make up a quarter of the population, the religious right claimed credit for giving President Bush his margin of victory.

This year, however, is very different. During the primary season, religious-right leaders could not unite around a candidate. On Super Tuesday, thirty per cent of evangelical Republicans voted for John McCain, the favorite of moderates and independents. Even more surprising, a third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee chose to vote Democratic, as did, a month later, forty-three per cent in Ohio. Meanwhile, Barack Obama--unlike John Kerry, in 2004--has been trying to win over white evangelicals. In televised discussions sponsored by religious organizations, he has spoken of his faith, and framed issues such as health care and the war in Iraq in moral terms. In recent weeks, he has met privately with evangelical leaders and started to reach out to values voters. These efforts suggest that he is hoping to do as well as, if not better than, Bill Clinton, who won a third of the white evangelical vote in both 1992 and 1996. Mark DeMoss, a public-relations expert whose firm has worked for Focus on the Family and for Franklin Graham, is among those who think he can.

This view is based in large part on the fact that religious-right activists are no longer the only evangelical leaders speaking out. Since 2004, influential pastors and the heads of many large faith organizations have set a new national-policy agenda, one founded on their understanding of the life of Jesus and his ministry to the poor, the outcast, and the peacemakers. The movement has no single charismatic leader, no institutional center, and no specific goals. It doesn't even have a name. But it is nonetheless posing the first major challenge to the religious right in a quarter of a century.

Dr. Joel C. Hunter, the senior pastor of Northland church in Orlando, Florida, who every week preaches to ten thousand people in his church and through the Internet, is one of the new leaders. Long active in community affairs, he has become an activist on the national level. He has lobbied Congress for legislation to curb global warming, pressed for comprehensive immigration reform, and denounced the virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican primaries. He has worked with a group of evangelicals and secular progressives to try to establish common ground on such polarizing issues as abortion and the role of religion in public life. "I think the way we have been dealing with differences in this country simply doesn't work," Hunter told me recently. He is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, and with his fellow-members he has condemned Bush Administration policies permitting torture and the inhumane treatment of detainees. He has also twice attended the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, an annual gathering of American and Muslim leaders in Qatar, sponsored by the Brookings Institution. After the first meeting, where Hunter discovered that even the American diplomats assumed that all evangelicals believed that Israel had a Biblical right to the Palestinian territories, he and eighty-three colleagues sent an open letter to President Bush, calling for a two-state solution and justice for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. The statement was "hardly revolutionary," Hunter said, with a grin, "but it was subversive," meaning subversive of the religious right.

In "The Future of Faith in American Politics," David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University's school of theology, in Atlanta, notes that the movement's leaders are theological conservatives who share the concerns of the religious right about sex outside of heterosexual marriage, the preservation of the family, and abortion. However, many leaders, such as Hunter, oppose government coercion on issues of private morality, ...