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258 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

or President Bush’s record on affordable health care. Before the elec-
tion, Pat Robertson even claimed that God told him President Bush
would win handily. “It doesn’t make any difference what he does,
good or bad,” Robertson said, “God picks him up because he’s a man
of prayer.” 62

Loconte levels similarly specific criticism at religious leaders on the left
who seem unable to distance themselves from Democratic Party politics.
Pointing to examples of religious voices that vex politics because they do
not easily fit into one camp or the other, Loconte concludes,

Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel once described a prophet
as “a person whose life and soul are at stake in what he says, who can
perceive the silent sigh of human anguish.” Many of today’s religious
leaders don’t discern that silent sigh because they can’t seem to escape
the din of political rhetoric. They camouflage their partisanship with
piety, and like the Biblical character Esau, sell their birthright for a
bowl of soup. 63

The election post-mortems thus described an emerging public script
hypothesizing a trend in relations between religion and politics. The
momentum out of the election clearly seemed to be with the religious
conservatives, who helped the Republicans retain the White House
(though, as in 2000, by a small percentage margin). Their influence was
thought to be rooted in conservative leaders’ supposed power to control
large swaths of the electorate and hold the keys to power for the
Republican Party. At the same time, though, there were and are doubts on
the left and the right about this scenario, and, in an important way, the
media are at the center of some of these doubts. Many of the most promi-
nent conservative religious leaders are prominent because of their media
presence. Christianity Today, the influential Evangelical magazine, raised
questions about this situation in an article in the spring of 2005.
Wondering who influences the Evangelicals that are now influencing poli-
tics, the author, Ted Olsen, noted that the most influential leaders were not
necessarily the ones who are most prominent in the media.

New York Times columnist David Brooks came early to the fight,
challenging fellow journalists to stop quoting Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson. “There is a world of difference between real-life people of
faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are
selected to represent them,” he said.
Evangelicals agree. A spring 2004 poll from PBS’s Religion and
Ethics Newsweekly found that only 23 percent of self-described evan-
gelicals had “warm or positive feelings” toward Falwell – the same