Writing in the NY Times, BeliefNet's Steve Waldman say Bush's conservative evangelical supporters expect him to deliver with amendments to ban gay marriage, abortion, and to break down the separation of church and state:

Finally, the "values voters" who helped keep him in Washington believe that God needs to be more present in public life. The Ten Commandments in the courtroom, prayer in school, "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance - these are all critical issues to many religious conservatives. They believe that we've kicked out God from our lives.

In other words, many religious voters also love Mr. Bush for reasons broader, more vague - and in some ways far more powerful - than merely his positions on specific issues like gay marriages. The professional activists, by contrast, have a very concrete agenda in mind: constitutional amendments on gay marriage and abortion, allowing churches to become more politically active, allowing more prayer in school and more.

In the past, Mr. Bush has tried to appeal to the rank-and-file evangelicals through his broad thematic statements and personal story, while remaining noncommittal on some specific policies. Now that neither Mr. Bush nor the conservative activists have to worry about his re-election, the big question is whether he will continue with that approach - and, if he chooses to, whether conservative activists will let him get away with it.

David Brooks by contrast tries to downplay that there are any policy implications of Bush's beholdenness to Christian conservatives, as he imagines the American red states as a bastion of goodness and religious tolerance where respect for religious pluralism flourishes:

It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues.

Look, I see Brooks at my neighborhood DC synagogue, and as much as he says he travels in the red states, I grew up in one a religious minority with Christmas trees in the public elementary schools, in a state that just a few years ago voted to outlaw teaching evolution in the schools in favor of Creationism. This guy has no idea what he's talking about regarding red states. It's really a foreign country to him. He talks about liberals like they have never encountered red state values and so look down on them out of snobbery. He's the one out of touch. Now, if he sends his children to the Kansas public schools, I may feel differently, but he's an East Coast Jewish person trying to talk up red state religious pluralism and broad mindedness without seeming to demonstrate the slightest desire to go experience it for the duration.

Update: Andrew Sullivan got an interesting email in response to Brooks' piece today worth posting here:

"Have to disagree with David Brooks and evidently you. To point out that the evangelicals voted in the same proportion for Bush as they did in 2000 gets a fact right and misses the point. What matters is that the Bush vote by these folks did not erode in the face of catastrophic management of post-invasion Iraq, prisoner atrocities, transformation of the surplus into a suffocating deficit and terrible job performance. It seems to me that their religious views trump everything. You switched your vote - why didn't they? The answer is complex, but you can bet it includes homophobia deftly catalyzed by Mr. Rove et. al." He's got a point, no?

I've gotten a lot of emails in response to my post above, most favorable, but one saying, there's a difference between something as benign as Christmas trees in the public schools and the Kansas state board of education's 1999 vote to ban state education exam questions on evolution, a decision which was later overturned [for now]. Agreed. But there was a slippery slope I experienced in Kansas regarding the separation of church and state, one seen most frequently in the public schools, that had to do with the basic assumption that the vast majority of people were Christian and religious and would tolerate a growing amount of imposition of Christian religious doctrine in the public sphere.

I'm extremely disturbed by the note of eerie triumphalism coming from the Christian right in response to Bush's reelection. And I am dismayed by people like Brooks' total smugness about it, as if there are no potential domestic policy implications to the Christian right seeing Bush's victory as a mandate for their radical agenda to be implemented. That Brooks doesn't see it reminds me that he is just another East Coast person content with his easy assumptions that his religious preferences and his family's religious minority status are utterly compatable with that agenda -- at least as long as he's living in a comfortably blue state neighborhood that respects diversity and religious pluralism.

Unlike Brooks, I have considerable respect for the intelligence and political sophistication and aggressiveness of the Christian right and those in the red states who want to promote and impose that agenda in the public sphere. Why doesn't Brooks? Why doesn't he take them at their word? And respect that they mean it when they say they want prayer in schools, to outlaw abortion, to ban the teaching of evolution in the schools, to deny gay people the rights enjoyed by others, and to allow the teaching of abstinence only? I believe they mean it. And I believe Bush is beholden to them to some degree for his election victory. And not to the "wider war" neoconservatives, who constitute a truly tiny minority.

More: George Scialabba has more.

Posted by Laura at November 6, 2004 10:50 AM