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George Bush has been given another four years in the White House, say both conservative and liberal activists, but the biggest winners today are probably religious conservatives. It's no mistake that his acceptance speech today included a promise to "uphold our deepest values of family and faith."

"The evidence points to the evangelicals as Bush's primary engine of victory," writes National Review's Larry Kudlow.

Religion poll guru John Green and Steve Waldman of Beliefnet do the math on the exit polls and agree: "In the pivotal states, he benefited from the strong support of evangelical Christians and, just as important, an impressive showing among regular churchgoing Catholics and mainline Protestants."

The Christian Coalition says "Christian evangelicals" are the group that put Bush over the top. The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins and former Bush opponent Gary Bauer prefer to focus on "values voters."

Concerned Women for America does a bit of dancing.

"Evangelicals voted in force in this year's election, securing the presidency for George W. Bush, granting parents in Florida the right to be notified before their minor daughter's abortion, and passing marriage protections laws in every state they were offered — even liberal Oregon," writes senior policy director Wendy Wright. "President Bush knows his strongest base, who they are and what drives them. Perhaps this is because, as many evangelicals and conservative Catholics can relate, he is one of us." (He's a conservative Catholic? No, as Green has earlier explained, "traditionalists" in both Protestant and Catholic camps have more in common with each other than they do with their ecclesiological cohorts, so the "us" refers to traditionalists, not Catholics.)

He's not one of "us," says James Ridgeway in The Village Voice. With the deck, "Bush gets mandate for theocracy," Ridgeway gets apocalyptic. "The dream of a secular, liberal democracy is lost: Christians are stronger than ever, and whether it's true or not, the spin will be that they played a key role in building the Bush base. The visceral, cutting edge of the Bush mandate is the attack on same-sex marriage, led by the Christian Right." Also troubling, he says: "Republicans without a doubt have made some, if only marginal, gains among black voters."

Well, with maybe it's time for Democrats to change their message, says Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. "Democrats peddle issues, and Republicans sell values," he writes. "One-third of Americans are evangelical Christians, and many of them perceive Democrats as often contemptuous of their faith. And, frankly, they're often right. Some evangelicals take revenge by smiting Democratic candidates."

No way, says Stephen Pizzo at Alternet. "Yes, the Values Party won because they pandered to America's fundamentalists. But I disagree that Democrats need to jump aboard the values express. … Democrats should not become value-whores like the GOP. That would only accelerate the Talibanization of America."

Such "dismissing, and even belittling, evangelicals' deeply held beliefs may not be a smart tactic for winning national elections," says Wright. But now that evangelicals are the most powerful voting bloc in the country, we need to be on our guard, she says. "Shrewd politicians will look for ways to peel off our votes and to woo compromise on issues about which we have no right to bargain—such as the right for the most vulnerable to live."

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November (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48