WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ALL
THE LIBERAL CHRISTIANS?

From AlterNet:

"Evangelical Christians used to be 40 percent of American Protestants; now they're over 60 percent," says Michael Hout, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. "Different birth rates account for 70 percent of that growth: Evangelicals have had an extra child per family for about 35 years. The other 30 percent comes from a process few sociologists of religion anticipated. Upwardly mobile Evangelicals used to mark their arrival in the local establishment by joining the Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church. No more. Now they stay evangelical and start a power brokers' prayer breakfast."

The shift extends to the top: Every U.S. president since 1976 has professed to be born again. White evangelicals, once split evenly along partisan lines, are now nearly two-to-one Republican. The Pew Forum's Fourth National Survey of Religion and Politics found that, since 1992, the number of evangelical Protestants who consider themselves conservative has jumped 13 percent.

Even historically Democratic African American evangelicals are backing President Bush in larger numbers (18 percent, double the number who voted for him in 2000, says the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies).

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