Confessing Evangelical

Great graphic from Get Religion (right), as it reports on "The great New York Times freak-out", in which the NYT's op-ed page is transformed into a Wailing Wall for bereaved Democrats.

The word "jihad" is being thrown around a lot to describe the motivations of conservative Christians who voted for Bush. So much for Democrats learning from this election that they need to turn away from 25 years of simply expressing denigration and contempt towards "the religious Right", and instead find ways to reach out to voters in the sea of red states now covering the US map.

As Jeremy Lott at Get Religion points out:

There was no holy war. There was an election and your side did badly. Sorry about that. That's how democracy goes sometimes.

But over at MCJ, Chris Johnson quotes the St Louis Post-Dispatch which, in between NYT-style hand-wringing, poses a "very profound question" that has also been nagging away at me for the past few days:

An unanswered question is whether the powerful wave of voters who sent Mr. Bush back to the White House to protect morality are fighting a rear-guard, faith-based action against the worst excesses of modern society, or are in the vanguard of a new wave of voters alienated by secularism, pop culture and the ethical thickets at the cutting edge of scientific discovery.

As Chris Johnson points out, that's a genuinely interesting question, and one which is difficult to answer at this stage. Part of me wonders whether the US is simply 40 years behind Europe when it comes to the collapse from a broadly Christian consensus into an almost-completely secularised public culture. Or whether, conversely, we'll look back in 50 years time and see European secularisation as the truly exceptional event, rather than the "natural trend" which America has somehow managed to buck.

Update: The map shown above is in fact a bit over-simplified in its depiction of Canada. The map on the left is taken from Kevin Steel's guide to Canada for despairing Democrats looking to flee the Bush Terror, and it's interesting to see how "red" Canada and "red" America match up.

Indeed, a few months ago Mark Steyn could be heard thinking aloud about the possibility of "red" Canada (though the Canadians, like the British, would say "blue") calling Quebec's bluff by seceding from Canada themselves and joining the USA...