Remember the Christian Coalition of America?

Under the political operative Ralph Reed in the 1990s it was an electoral force to be reckoned with as it mobilized millions of conservative Christians to vote for mostly Republican Party candidates and causes.

It has since lost influence and political ground to other “religious right” groups such as the Family Research Council. But it remains a sizeable grassroots organization and is still unflinchingly conservative.

So it will no doubt surprise some to see that this week it has joined with the National Wildlife Federation – whose 4 million members and supporters includes 420,000 sportsmen and women – to run an ad urging the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that among other things addresses the pressing problem of climate change.

“Defending the status quo is no longer an option. We need swift action
to ensure America is the world leader in clean energy technology.
We can put Americans to work making and installing the clean,
renewable energy technologies that reduce our dependency on
foreign oil and address climate change.
Senators should work together to move forward with a clean energy plan for America,” says the ad, which ran this week in Politico.

It comes as the U.S. Senate considers a bill to curb the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

Other U.S. Christian groups and prominent evangelicals such as Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter have urged action on climate change — a top priority of President Barack Obama — on the grounds that the poor will bear the brunt of warming temperatures. They also see a biblical responsibility to care for God’s creations.

(PHOTO: Vanishing Arctic Sea ice is one of the most visible signs of global warming. REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

But influential conservative Christians such as Richard land of the Southern Baptist Convention have spent the past months assailing the cap and trade provisions of the bill as a massive tax hike. In many religious right circles the climate change issue is seen as downright hysterical or an attempt by leftists to cripple the U.S. economy.

But even the most hard-line conservative Christians are no longer united on this issue.

Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican Senator from South Carolina, broke ranks with his party and recently outlined a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a New York Times op-ed piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry.

That won him praise from national hunting groups and local ones in his home state, which has a robust shooting and fishing culture woven into its rural fabric.

We have recently blogged and written on U.S. hunters and anglers — many of whom are evangelical Christian, conservative and Republican — urging action on climate change, not least because of its threat to the game they pursue.

Roberta Combs, the president of the Christian Coalition, told me in a telephone interview that her group joined forces with the NWF on this issue because it saw a biblical need to look after God’s creation. But she said it also wants America to pursue alternative energy policies to reduce its independence on foreign oil including expanding its use of nuclear power — a stance sure to make many greens see red.

“We don’t agree with environmental groups on everything but if we can find things we agree on this will be a better bill…I’m real proud of Senator Graham. He’s a man of lots of wisdom,” she said.

Republicans are mostly skeptical of any move to “cap and trade” U.S. carbon emissions that result from burning coal and oil, decrying it as a massive job-killing tax by forcing the use of more expensive wind and solar power.

But a big chunk of their base seems to be parting company with them on this issue though climate change skepticism still runs deep in the U.S. heartland.

According to a Pew Research Center poll released on Thursday, 36 percent of Americans say global warming is a result of human activity, down from 47 percent in April 2008.

The latest issue of Southern Baptist Texan to arrive in my mailbox has a front page story which caught my eye about a new evangelism drive aimed at the state’s Muslim population. You can see their on-line report here.

“The increasing presence of Muslims in Texas is an opportunity Texas Southern Baptists must not miss, says Bruno Molina, an SBTC ministry associate specializing in ethnic evangelism and outreach. To that end, a series of workshops—including one next month on engaging Muslim women with the gospel—and three printed resources aimed at helping Texas Southern Baptists understand Islamic beliefs, are planned for the fall and into 2010,” it says.

“We are praying for Muslims during a month (Ramadan) that they are seeking God and waging spiritual warfare on behalf of Muslims in the form of evangelistic prayer,” Molina was quoted as saying.

The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention is the state’s branch of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America’s largest evangelical denomination and one of its most conservative.

The SBC has recently been ringing the alarm bells of decline, an issue we blogged on in June. Its research arm LifeWay Research said then that its numbers, currently around 16 million, would fall nearly 50 percent by 2050 “unless the aging and predominantly white denomination reverses a 50-year trend and does more to strengthen evangelism, reach immigrants, and develop a broader ethnic base.”

In Texas, the SBTC has put a lot of effort into reaching out to the state’s fast-growing and predominantly Catholic Hispanic population — which is no doubt a good strategy for long-term demographic viability. (They would argue it is also a strategy to win over a large group for Christ).

But reaching out to Muslims this way — who do share with Christians the Abrahamic tradition of monotheism –seems a new take and one that involves even more cultural (and perhaps political) minefields. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that about 0.6 percent of the adult U.S. population is Muslim and in Texas about 0.5 percent, making it a very small group.

But Southern Baptists like other evangelical Christians are keen on “engaging Islam,” which is not the same as various the inter-faith dialogue efforts being pursued by different groups across the span of religious beliefs. When U.S. evangelicals talk about “engaging Islam” they usually mean winning Muslim hearts, minds and (they would believe) souls for Christ.

Winning Islamic converts is no doubt seen as especially vital to some conservative American evangelicals who question the patriotism and loyalty of U.S. Muslims against the backdrop of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “war on terror.”

On Sept. 25-26, the SBTC will host a seminar in the Dallas suburb of Grapevine exclusively for women on reaching Muslim women, taught by Rockie Naser, a Jordanian-born American who became a Christian 11 years ago after she moved to Texas from Chicago.

(Photo: The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan, May 13, 2005.  REUTERS/Rebecca Cook RC/HK

The evangelical Protestant revival has been one of the most dynamic religious and social movements in the United States in the last three decades. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, one in four U.S. adults now count themselves as followers of this faith tradition.

So it may come as a surprise to some non-American readers of this blog that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) – with 16 million members, America’s largest evangelical denomination and the country’s second largest after the Catholic Church — is ringing the alarm bells of decline.

Its research arm LifeWay Research released the following projections this week at the convention’s annual meeting in Kentucky:  it said its numbers would fall nearly 50 percent by 2050 “unless the aging and predominantly white denomination reverses a 50-year trend and does more to strengthen evangelism, reach immigrants, and develop a broader ethnic base.”

“Using U.S. Census projected population figures, SBC membership could fall from a peak of 6 percent of the American population in the late 1980s to 2 percent in 2050,” said LifeWay director Ed Stetzer.

The SBC in 1951 enjoyed robust annual growth of four percent and still had two percent in the early 1970s but in recent years it has been falling about 0.6 percent per year.

The number of baptisms — which is how the SBC counts converts and is key to a group that sees bringing souls to Christ as its raison d’être — have also been in decline.

“I’m not saying the sky is falling but we are alarmed about it,” said Gary Ledbetter, a spokesman for the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. He and other Southern Baptists I spoke to said they saw the problem as a spiritual one and they see themselves not doing enough in their evangelism efforts.

It all raises a number of interesting questions and issues. While the SBC does have churches outside of the South, most of its membership remains concentrated there. So the ceiling it seems to have hit may point to the changing nature of the South itself as immigrants pour into the region from other parts of the United States as well as other countries.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex where I reside, a growing number of previously “dry” areas where you couldn’t buy booze are going “wet” — a trend seen elsewhere across the South. That says a lot about the changing nature of the South and strongly suggests the SBC is losing its clout in public affairs and policy. If there is a dry area in the South, you can bet it has a Baptist church. But more and more Baptist churches are finding themselves in wet areas as well.

If the SBC is in decline, one also has to wonder what the long-term political implications could be for the Republican Party. Conservative white evangelical Protestants have become its most reliable base. In recent election cycles it has relied on this base to deliver the vote in part by galvanizing opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.

And the conservative SBC, one could argue, is the core of that base.

Of course, the SBC could be losing people to other evangelical denominations or even the Mormon faith (SBC officials have long maintained that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a successful “poacher” of its flock). Neither trend would necessarily hurt the Republican Party. Mormons for one are every bit as conservative and Republican as Southern Baptists.

But Republican strategists will probably not take comfort by the fact that the SBC’s demographics in many ways mirror that of the party itself. Old, white, and Southern (one could add male and rural), with expansion dependent upon attracting immigrants and other ethnic groups, notably Hispanics. It is perhaps no coincidence that the core of the Republican base looks a lot like the party itself.

(Photo: The SBC leadership meeting George W. Bush while he was still U.S. president.Oct From L-R are: President of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention Dr. Morris Chapman, former President of the Southern Baptist Convention Dr. Frank Page, Bush, and Page’s wife Dayle. REUTERS/Larry Downing, October 11, 2006 (UNITED STATES)

Back in January we reported on a new book which argued that a hatred of slavery did much to form Charles Darwin’s views on natural selection as he sought to prove that blacks and whites had a common ancestor and were not separate species or products of “separate creations” as many of the 19th century defenders of white supremacy maintained.

I did a blog at the time to draw attention to my colleague Mike Collett-White’s story on “Darwin’s Sacred Cause” by Adrian Desmond and James Moore and said that it had piqued my curiosity enough that I might be tempted to read it. I have done just that and think it raises a couple of issues that will be of interest to readers of this blog.

(Photo: A portrait of Charles Darwin is displayed as part of an exhibition in Darwin’s former home Down House, Kent, England, 12/02/2009, REUTERS/Stringer, UK)

For starters, much of the credit for the anti-slavery movement has been taken by evangelicals and other Christians such as the Quakers, who were indeed often the driving force behind it.  There was much excitement in U.S. evangelical circles two years ago about the release of the movie “Amazing Grace” about British anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce who was an ardent evangelical. Much ink has been spilled on this topic, notably in 2005 by Adam Hochschild in his superb book “Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.”

But no one would mistake the father of modern biological science for an evangelical. Most of his biographers agree (based on overwhelming evidence) that Darwin gradually lost his own faith. Another leading abolitionist in Darwin’s day was his cigar-smoking dining companion Harriet Martineau, who was also a self-proclaimed atheist. Darwin’s own family — which had its share of religious sceptics, notably his father, as well as devout believers– was also heavily involved in the anti-slavery movement.

So it seems that the secular humanist crowd also has an old and some would say noble tradition of anti-slavery agitation  which it can draw on — and it was an issue that united it with evangelicals. Similar bridges are being built today between secular and evangelical leaders on issues like climate change, torture and even the modern slave trade.

It is also worth noting of course that Darwin and his intellectual offspring are often a favored target of conservative evangelicals, especially in the United States. This goes beyond the trouble that many biblical creationists have with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is more popularly known as evolution. Some conservative Christians say that Darwin’s theories helped to inspire the eugenics movement whose advocates included Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. They therefore tie Darwin to the abortion rights movement, which Harry R. Jackson Jr, a leading African American conservative evangelical, has dubbed a “black genocide” (because of the large number of black women who seek abortions).

But Darwin himself — as Desmond and Moore elegantly demonstrate in their thought-provoking book — was passionately opposed to cruelty inflicted on racial grounds and so sought to find humanity’s “common descent.” There is almost universal scientific agreement now that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa (which Darwin suspected to be the case). This is a notion that has tellingly troubled some modern white supremacists, some of whom still cling to the fantasy that blacks and whites have different roots (I had a Polish doctor in South Africa once tell me this matter-of-factly, he just could not buy the out of Africa, common descent image).

(Photo: A replica of the remains of a more than 3-million-year-old female hominid known as “Lucy” at the National Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia , 07/08/2007 REUTERS/STR New)

And there are evangelical traditions in the United States which don’t have the proudest histories on the issue of race relations. America’s largest evangelical group, the Southern Baptist Convention, gets its name because it broke ranks with its Yankee brethren because of its support for slavery. And many Southern Baptists were not exactly big supporters of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. (To the SBC’s credit it is working hard to make amends on issues of race and racial reconciliation and last year elected a Native American as its president. But some of the SBC’s critics might say it shouldn’t throw too many racial stones Darwin’s way).

This is all grist for the very big mill that is the legacy of Darwin — who is getting a lot of attention this year because it marks his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of  ”On the Origin of Species.” But Darwin saved his big surprise on humanity and evolution for the “Descent of Man” in 1871. That, it seems, has sealed him a place in the history of the struggle against racial injustice.

A handful of activists from People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA) urged Southern Baptists meeting in Indianapolis on Tuesday to try the vegetarian option. “For Christ’s Sake, Go Vegetarian,” read one of their signs outside the convention center in downtown Indianapolis, where the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America’s largest evangelical denomination, is holding its annual meeting.

“The Bible’s greatest message is compassion,” said PETA campaign coordinator Ashley Byrne, who said she hoped to convince Southern Baptists to adopt a diet that was compassionate to animals by not eating them.

The SBC, like the broader U.S. evangelical movement, is divided about what action to take on “creation care” or environmental issues such as climate change.

But the culturally and politically conservative SBC, better known for its fondness of “guns and God,” probably does not have a lot of vegetarians in its ranks.

An informal Reuters survey of a few attending the meeting turned up none.

One major nationwide survey in 2006 found that 50 percent of licensed U.S. hunters and anglers were evangelical Christians — hardly rich fishing grounds for coverts to the PETA cause.

America’s largest evangelical denomination, the 16-million strong Southern Baptist Convention, is holding its annual meeting in Indianapolis on Tuesday and Wednesday against the backdrop of a decline in the number of yearly baptisms.

This is serious stuff indeed for a group that places much emphasis on the conversion experience, the acceptance of Jesus as a person’s savior and the rite of passage that goes with this acceptance: a public immersion in water or baptism.

In April the SBC released its latest baptism numbers — figures it tracks closely, underscoring the importance attatched to them.

In 2007, baptisms decreased by 5 percent to 345,941 from 364,826 in 2006. It was the third straight year that the number of baptisms fell and the lowest total since 1987.

I have blogged on this topic in the past, before the latest figures, which one Southern Baptist official told me “hit everyone in the guts.”

Of course some people attend Southern Baptist churches without taking the dunk, including — at least according to many reports — presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

But this decrease in baptisms could also point to a broader slowdown in the swelling ranks of America’s evangelical movement, which now includes one in four adults in the United States.

The U.S. evangelical movement is experiencing “growth pains” with divisions emerging over its direction and a push to broaden its Biblical agenda from its recent political focus on family and cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage, to embrace others such as climate change.

These divisions are also emerging within the SBC, a bedrock of cultural and theological conservatism.

These trends could soften some of the evangelical movement’s partisan — read Republican — edge, which is perhaps not good news for McCain, who is regarded as a liberal compromiser by some of the more conservative evangelical leaders. More on this angle here and here and here.

But some of McCain’s policies such as his call for action on climate change are also in line with more centrist evangelical thinking.

Outgoing SBC President Frank Page is fond of quipping that Southern Baptists are well known for what they are against but need to talk more about what they are for. He told me that a broader agenda had resonance especially with younger evangelicals.

“Younger evaneglicals want to see this … environmental stewardship and other areas such as poverty, homelessness and hunger,” Page said, noting the SBC’s little reported work in area such as diasaster relief and food banks.

Six candidates are running for the rotating two-year term to replace Page. Interviews with them by Baptist Press can be seen here.

So stay tuned and watch this space.