The article states:
"If this week's exit polls tell us anything about religion, they remind us that there are tens of millions of voters in this country who believe in God, read their Scripture, pray, regularly attend a house of worship—and do not consider themselves born-again Christians."
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If anything, this article points the way to a new trend in religiosity in America: People who say they are religious, but who don't follow the hard line of evangelical Christianity.
What does this mean for the Republican Party?
Well, it means they need to re-structure their base, frankly, because in all honesty, their base is shrinking.
Why would their base shrink? I believe it is the natural evolution of the age of our population: we have a new generation coming on, and these younger spiritualists do not see the church per se as the all-powerful source of their faith. They are independent believers who don't feel the need to kowtow to the church in order to be religious.
Armed with that premise, it's logical to believe that we have a whole new generation of Christians who are not going to follow the mantra of a party, just because some pastor somewhere tells them to do such-and-such.
My personal faith is exactly that way: I'm a Christian, but I think I have sense enough to read my own Bible and make my own judgments about what it means to me. And what it means to me is this: I cannot condone attacking a basically defenseless nation (aka Iraq) simply because I "think" they might attack us at some future time. I cannot condone torturing individuals, no matter what I think they may have done. I cannot condone allowing people to sit and suffer after a national disaster, oblivious to their pain. So I personally don't condone our current national policy of preemptive war. Because, you see, MY Bible does not tell me to do that. If I read it correctly, Jesus always was a pacifist, a man who advocated turning the other cheek, giving the coat and the cloak, and "do good to them who hate you." So frankly, preemptive war is totally against my beliefs, as is torturing anyone.
If there are substantial numbers of other people who share my beliefs, then this bodes poorly for the Republican Party if they don't get with the program.
My personal vision of what the Republican Party represents currently is this: we have the "old white rich guys", coupled with the "young redneck rural poor". And it's a strange combination indeed. It means that the poor and relatively uneducated are the only ones believing the horse-hockey that the rich white guys are telling them.
That right there should tell the republicans something: that they are dependent on a base that is rapidly shrinking, because our country has a relatively small percentage of rich white guys and the numbers of the rural poor rednecks are shrinking.
Gee, the republicans might actually have to go mainstream in order to survive! Wouldn't THAT be interesting?
Read this article to see how the republicans have crapped in their own nest, and lost an election because of it.
For all intents and purposes, conservatism--as a national movement--is completely and thoroughly dead. Barack Obama did not destroy it, however. It was George W. Bush and John McCain who destroyed conservatism in America.
Soon after G.W. Bush was elected, it quickly became obvious he was no conservative. On the contrary, George Bush has forever established himself as a Big-Government, warmongering, internationalist neocon. Making matters worse was the way Bush presented himself as a conservative Christian. In fact, Bush's portrayal of himself as a conservative Christian paved the way for the betrayal and ultimate destruction of conservatism (something I also predicted years ago). And the greatest tragedy of this deception is the way that Christian conservatives so thoroughly (and stupidly) swallowed the whole Bush/McCain neocon agenda.
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