Fruitcake Toss

Paul Harvey

Peter Montgomery, "Attacking Obama's Beliefs," discusses the campaign (one not confined to James Dobson's latest bile about Obama's "fruitcake" views) to slander Barack Obama. The negative response from many evangelicals (see this site, for example, which usefully contrasts Dobson's tendentious hyperbole -- i.e. lies -- with Obama's own plain statements) likely suggests that this attack will backfire. Montgomery writes:

The frantic and blustery attacks on Obama’s faith by Dobson, Tony Perkins, and other Religious Right leaders comes across as an increasingly desperate effort to prevent the ongoing shift of evangelical Christians away from the narrow abortion-and-gays focus that Religious Right leaders have demanded be the dominant priority for Christian engagement in the public arena. There has been plenty of evidence for the past couple of years that most Christians, including most evangelicals, don’t share Dobson and Perkins’ political priorities. And now, as those leaders rant and rave about the supposed deficiencies in Barack Obama’s orthodoxy, Pew has made clear that they can’t even stake a claim to faithfully representing the Christianity of most American evangelicals.

True, although Dobson, Richard Land, and other evangelicals of that stripe have decried the decline of faith even among evangelicals, part of their "persecuted minority" rhetoric, so I doubt the Pew survey will faze them. Its findings are woven already into their declension narrative.

Our local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette, covers Dobson and this latest controversy in its story, "Evangelism [the paper means, conservative evangelicalism] May Be Losing Its Sway.