Born Again

IN DECEMBER 2001, Karl Rove gave a provocative impromptu speech about the decline of the religious right. As a rule, presidential political strategists aren't paragons of forthrightness, but on this morning at least, Rove seems to have been wearing his neutral analyst's suit. Claiming that 19 million self-identified evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Christians should have been expected to go to the polls in 2000, he noted that only 15 million did so. "Just over 4 million of them," he told his audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, "failed to turn out and vote. And yet they are obviously part of our base."

Since then Rove has not broached the topic (his office didn't return calls for this story). But it was a striking number, and the story of evangelical disaffection has had a long life in the press. Newsweek reported last fall that "the primary demographic objective of [the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign] is to increase turnout among families that consider themselves evangelical."

Add all this to the well-publicized troubles of the Christian Coalition, and it's easy to conclude that evangelicals really are disengaging from politics. In his speech Rove echoed the gloomy thesis of the book by former Moral Majority staffers Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, "Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right Can't Save America": "[W]e may . . . be returning to a point in America where fundamentalists and evangelicals and Pentecostals remain true to their beliefs," said Rove, "which are things of the--you know, politics is corrupt, and therefore we shouldn't participate."

There's only one problem with this analysis. There's no proof. Unless Rove has his hands on secret poll data, the evidence is that the turnout of white evangelical voters didn't change much from 1994 to 2000.