KEY WEST, Fla. - Rice University professor Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, shared on Tuesday what he said were his eight misconceptions about the evangelical movement before he began researching his influential book.

1. His first fallacy: “I assumed they (evangelicals) had succeeded because they were united,” he told  the “Faith Angle” conference organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The reality: he argued evangelicals had sharp divisions but their burning in the belly belief that something is fundamentally wrong with the world drives them and means they can take political set-backs on the chin. 

2. He said his second fallacy was the assumption that “2004 was the pinnacle of evangelical influence in U.S. politics”:

But he said many people he had spoken to said they were disappointed that they had voted for President George W. Bush but in their view received nothing in return. He said the biggest evangelical policy triumph was the 1998 passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, which was aimed at promoting religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy and evangelicals had lobbied hard to get approved.

3.  “I thought there was a select group who were kingmakers in the Republican Party like James Dobson (of Focus on the Family).”

The reality: he said what he learned was that it was a movement with strong or very public leaders but they did not have make or break status within the Republican Party.

4. Lindsay said he also assumed that the centers of evangelical power were in places like Colorado Springs, Colo., headquarters for influential conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family.

But he said the movement’s centers of power were actually the traditional ones like New York and Los Angeles and that the sharpest evangelical divide was between what he called the “cosmopolitan evangelicals and populists”.  The populists he said are culture warriors embattled against secular society while the cosmopolitans  want a place at the table but want “their faith to be seen as reasonable”.

5.  He said he had assumed that the new issues publicly embraced by the movement such as action on the environment “signaled a party realignment.”

But he said evangelicals are still center/right and among the most loyal of Republicans.

6. He said while the domestic realm was important to evangelicals the really interesting emerging evangelical story is in foreign affairs and the movement’s enthusiasm for foreign aid and investment. 

7. Lindsay also said that he thought church life drove evangelical political activity but that much of the real action was in the “para-church” sector such as universities.

8.  Finally, he said he assumed politics had been the main focus for most evangelicals.
But many of the people he interviewed articulated a view that politics was “downstream of culture.”

- Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Bush at a White House event highlighting National Prayer Day earlier this month)

SHELBYVILLE, Ind. - Barack Obama can talk about his childhood years in Kansas and upbringing by his white Midwestern grandparents, but if voters at one small-town Indiana cafe are any indication, he has a long way to go to convince them he represents heartland America.

“Obama has great ideas but his background scares me,” said Chris Leighton, 60, a secretary having lunch at the Chaperral Cafe in Shelbyville, in southeast Indiana. “Everyone talks about him being a Muslim and having ties to terrorism, but how do people really find out?”

The incorrect belief that the Illinois senator is a Muslim was shared by half a dozen others in the restaurant — a sign that dirty campaign tactics and Internet innuendo has taken root among some voters in Indiana, the next state to vote.

Construction worker Ron Debaun, 61, said he hadn’t yet decided whether he would support Obama or Hillary Clinton in Indiana’s May 6 primary, noting they both “have good ideas.” But he’s leaning toward Clinton.

What doesn’t he like about Obama?

“His Muslim ties,” said Debaun.

Why does he think Obama is a Muslim?

“Let’s just say that he admits it himself,” he said.

Retired locksmith Leslie Hedman, 61, said he doesn’t like any of the three candidates — Clinton, Obama, or Republican John McCain – because none are committed Christians.

“Obama is a Muslim,” he said. Where did he hear that?

“He said he was but then he said he’s not,” said Hedman.

Ironically enough, many of the lunchtime crowd said they were also turned off by Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright – the former pastor of Obama’s Christian church in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ.

“I definitely don’t like Obama because of the mess with him and his pastor. I don’t think he’s been honest about it,” said Candace Demmin, 37, as she had lunch with her mom.

“How can you go to a church for 20 years and not heard your minister say something off-color? Either he’s heard it and is lying about it, or he’s lying about going to church as much as he does,” said Demmin. “In which case he’s not the Christian he says he is.”

Obama strongly denounced his former pastor on Tuesday and called his racially charged comments “appalling.”

And if Obama’s Muslim ties and Christian pastor aren’t bad enough, his atheism is the last straw.

“A person who doesn’t believe in anything? I don’t want anything to do with him,” said cafe owner and Clinton supporter Shirley Bailey, 70. “He says he won’t take an oath on the Bible, he won’t salute the American flag. That doesn’t sit well with me.”

Obama was sworn in at the U.S. Senate with his hand on a Bible. He stopped wearing an American flag lapel pin — standard issue for U.S. politicians — saying that a pin on the chest matters less than what’s in the heart.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Andrea Hopkins (Shirley Bailey, owner of the Chaperral Cafe in Shelbyville, Indiana, said she can’t support Barack Obama in Indiana’s May 6 primary because of his religious views. Many of her customers agreed.)

DALLAS - Another exit poll has uncovered more evangelical Democrats and indicates that their agenda seems to be moving beyond the “God, Guns and Gays” focus of the Religious Right’s old culture warriors.

An exit poll commisioned after Ohio’s Tuesday primary by Faith in Public Life, the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Sojourners asked both Republicans and Democrats if they were evangelical or born-again Christian. Almost all other polls have only asked this of Republican primary voters as this group is widely regarded as a key base for the GOP.

The poll, conducted by Zogby International, found that 43 percent of white evangelical Ohio primary voters took part in the Democratic primary and 57 percent in the Republican one.

Other national polls still show over 60 percent of white evangelicals firmly in the Republican camp but analysts have said they do not expect them to play quite the same role in this November’s election as they did in the 2004 White House race, when by some estimates  around 78 percent of those who cast ballots did so for President George W. Bush.

The Tuesday poll also found that 42 percent of Ohio’s white evangelical voters ranked jobs and the economy as the most important issue area in deciding how to vote versus 14 percent who ranked abortion and same-sex marriage as the most important issue.

Such a finding may not be surprising in a Rust Belt state like Ohio, which has been shedding manufacturing and other jobs.  But the poll also found that 54 percent of white evangelical primary voters surveyed wanted a broader agenda such as ending poverty and protecting the environment.

The poll had a fairly wide margin of error of 5 percentage points.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.