The New Evangelicals

The New Evangelicals

This election, a growing movement presents a challenge to the religious right.
by Frances FitzGerald

June 30, 2008

Evangelical leaders have been most divided over global warming.

Just four years ago, during the last Presidential election, leaders on the religious right were the only white evangelicals whose voices were heard in the public arena. In their own gatherings, they proposed such things as the abolition of the capital-gains tax, a war on radical Islam, and an end to the “myth of separation” between church and state, but they concentrated their public campaigns on gay rights and abortion, the two issues that have resonated most strongly with evangelicals and helped to bring them into the Republican Party. Under the leadership of James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, and others, including Richard Land, the official in charge of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention, activists organized “values voters” with the help of ballot initiatives in eleven states for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. In November, all the initiatives passed, and George W. Bush took seventy-eight per cent of the white evangelical vote—a record for a Presidential candidate. Because evangelicals make up a quarter of the population, the religious right claimed credit for giving President Bush his margin of victory.

This year, however, is very different. During the primary season, religious-right leaders could not unite around a candidate. On Super Tuesday, thirty per cent of evangelical Republicans voted for John McCain, the favorite of moderates and independents. Even more surprising, a third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee chose to vote Democratic, as did, a month later, forty-three per cent in Ohio. Meanwhile, Barack Obama—unlike John Kerry, in 2004—has been trying to win over white evangelicals. In televised discussions sponsored by religious organizations, he has spoken of his faith, and framed issues such as health care and the war in Iraq in moral terms. In recent weeks, he has met privately with evangelical leaders and started to reach out to values voters. These efforts suggest that he is hoping to do as well as, if not better than, Bill Clinton, who won a third of the white evangelical vote in both 1992 and 1996. Mark DeMoss, a public-relations expert whose firm has worked for Focus on the Family and for Franklin Graham, is among those who think he can.

This view is based in large part on the fact that religious-right activists are no longer the only evangelical leaders speaking out. Since 2004, influential pastors and the heads of many large faith organizations have set a new national-policy agenda, one founded on their understanding of the life of Jesus and his ministry to the poor, the outcast, and the peacemakers. The movement has no single charismatic leader, no institutional center, and no specific goals. It doesn’t even have a name. But it is nonetheless posing the first major challenge to the religious right in a quarter of a century.

Dr. Joel C. Hunter, the senior pastor of Northland church in Orlando, Florida, who every week preaches to ten thousand people in his church and through the Internet, is one of the new leaders. Long active in community affairs, he has become an activist on the national level. He has lobbied Congress for legislation to curb global warming, pressed for comprehensive immigration reform, and denounced the virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican primaries. He has worked with a group of evangelicals and secular progressives to try to establish common ground on such polarizing issues as abortion and the role of religion in public life. “I think the way we have been dealing with differences in this country simply doesn’t work,” Hunter told me recently. He is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, and with his fellow-members he has condemned Bush Administration policies permitting torture and the inhumane treatment of detainees. He has also twice attended the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, an annual gathering of American and Muslim leaders in Qatar, sponsored by the Brookings Institution.

After the first meeting, where Hunter discovered that even the American diplomats assumed that all evangelicals believed that Israel had a Biblical right to the Palestinian territories, he and eighty-three colleagues sent an open letter to President Bush, calling for a two-state solution and justice for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. The statement was “hardly revolutionary,” Hunter said, with a grin, “but it was subversive,” meaning subversive of the religious right.
In “The Future of Faith in American Politics,” David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University’s school of theology, in Atlanta, notes that the movement’s leaders are theological conservatives who share the concerns of the religious right about sex outside of heterosexual marriage, the preservation of the family, and abortion. However, many leaders, such as Hunter, oppose government coercion on issues of private morality, and all have what Gushee calls a “consistent pro-life agenda”—one that accords with Catholic social teachings on war, poverty, and human rights. Moreover, they lack the cultural attitudes descended from the fundamentalist resistance to modernist thought, such as a distrust of science, a rejection of institutional solutions to poverty, and the notion that evangelicals are the saving remnant of Christianity and the American tradition. Religious-right leaders have perpetuated these attitudes and done their best to see that evangelicals continue to regard themselves as an embattled subculture. The new leaders, however, embrace pluralism. Unlike the right, they don’t engage in partisan politics, but many of the policies they espouse coincide with those of the Democratic Party. What they aspire to is nothing less than an end to the culture wars and the polarization of American politics.

The movement is new, but there is a sizable constituency for it. According to polls taken in the past four years, half of all evangelicals have substantial differences with the religious right. As Mark Pinsky, a veteran religion writer at the Orlando Sentinel, has observed, Sun Belt evangelicalism is very different from that of the old Bible Belt: suburban families trying to get their kids into college don’t believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and they don’t join crusades to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Furthermore, they don’t like the angry intolerance of the religious right and cringe when they are associated with it. If Hunter and the others succeed in winning over this group, they will either change the Republican Party beyond the recognition of Karl Rove or doom it to electoral defeat for many years to come.

Before 2004, only three evangelical leaders publicly challenged the religious right’s agenda: Jim Wallis, of Sojourners; Tony Campolo, a well-known Baptist preacher; and Ron Sider, the president of Evangelicals for Social Action. All three founded activist organizations in the nineteen-seventies, but, as energetic and articulate as they are, their constituencies seemed permanently confined to a progressive minority.

Then, just at the moment of the religious right’s triumph in the 2004 election, the new movement came to life. In October of that year, the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella organization of denominations and churches which claims a constituency of thirty million, voted to accept a position paper laying out seven principles for Christian political engagement. The document, “For the Health of the Nation,” called upon evangelicals not only to safeguard the sanctity of life and to nurture families but also to seek justice for the poor, protect human rights, work for peace, and preserve God’s creation. The document was worded so as not to provoke a conservative reaction, but the following spring Richard Cizik, the N.A.E.’s vice-president for governmental affairs, and other N.A.E. progressives in Washington moved ahead with an agenda that included lobbying for debt relief for the poorest countries and galvanizing support for legislation to curb global warming.
That summer, Mark Noll, a prominent evangelical historian now at the University of Notre Dame, told a journalist that “For the Health of the Nation” was “an effort to bring out of the background things that have always been there but have been overshadowed by the concentration on life issues.” He added, “Evangelicals don’t want themselves identified as the Republican Party at prayer.” As he suggested, some evangelical leaders had wanted to take new directions for years; by 2005 they were further motivated by their embarrassment at the association of all evangelicals with the Bush Administration.

The advocates for the new agenda have come to include some of the most influential evangelicals, among them Rick Warren, the author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” and the pastor of Saddleback church, in Orange County, California, who is, after Billy Graham, the best-known evangelical preacher in the country. Warren heads a network of pastors and laymen, and just before the 2004 election he sent out a letter to a hundred and thirty-six thousand of them saying that pro-life and pro-family issues should determine their vote. But a few months later he sent the same network a letter urging them to put pressure on Bush to increase foreign aid, provide debt relief, and reform trade rules to help the global poor. In April of 2005, he called upon his congregation to support an effort in Rwanda to alleviate hunger, teach literacy, and slow the spread of AIDS. His ultimate goal, he announced, was to enlist a billion Christians worldwide in the struggle against poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Warren had, it seemed, undergone a form of conversion. “I have been so busy building my church that I have not cared about the poor,” he told pastors in Kigali. “I have sinned and I am sorry.” At an international Baptist convention that summer, he called for “a second Reformation,” one that would be about “deeds not creeds.”
Since then, Bill Hybels, the pastor of the Willow Creek church, in South Barrington, Illinois, and the leader of an association of twelve thousand churches, has put his congregation to work on racial reconciliation in the Chicago area, the global AIDS epidemic, and poverty in Africa. He and others, including the presidents of evangelical seminaries and colleges, have signed well-publicized open letters on issues from global warming to Darfur, and some have criticized the religious right and the policies of the Bush Administration. A pivotal figure in the movement, David Neff, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today Media Group, has done all three. He has changed his flagship magazine from a fairly conservative publication into one that has taken the lead in discussions of sensitive subjects like divorce and issues like climate change. He drafted “For the Health of the Nation,” and helped prepare a manifesto for the movement, which was released in May. Signed by seventy-three of its leaders, Joel Hunter among them, the manifesto declares that evangelicals see it as their duty “never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system or nationality,” because “that way faith loses its independence, the church becomes ‘the regime at prayer,’ Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology.”

There have even been stirrings from within the Southern Baptist Convention. The largest of the evangelical denominations, the S.B.C. has long been dominated by conservatives closely aligned with the right wing of the Republican Party. But in the 2006 election for the S.B.C. presidency dissident pastors persuaded their fellows, via blogs, to reject the establishment candidate. The S.B.C. elected instead Frank Page, a mildmannered South Carolina pastor who has encouraged the moderates and avoided partisan politics.

“We’re at a watershed in our history,” Joel Hunter told me over lunch at his home in Orlando. “What has passed for an ‘evangelical’ up to now is a stereotype created by the people with the loudest voices. But there’s a whole constituency out there that it doesn’t apply to. Now something is happening. You can feel it like the force of a tsunami under the water.” It was a hot day, but the windows of Hunter’s small house looked out onto one of the numerous lakes in the area. Relaxed and for once without a suit jacket—he usually wears a gray suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie—he paused while his wife, Becky, a petite blond woman in a tailored dress, poured us coffee. He went on to talk about the roots of Anglo-American Protestantism. “Have you read Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book ‘The Roads to Modernity’? It’s about the difference between the French and the English Enlightenment—the French, who focussed on reason, and the English, who were more theistic and linked reason to acts of compassion.”

Hunter, who is sixty, is trimly built, not tall, and so unassuming that it’s often hard to imagine him as a megachurch pastor. On the days he preaches, he parks his car in the lot farthest from the church so that others are not inconvenienced, and at staff meetings he listens a good deal more than he speaks. He often opens his sermons with folksy stories, but he is something of an intellectual, and more of an introvert than most in his congregation know. To have time to himself, Hunter gets up at four in the morning, and after making his devotions and answering e-mails he goes to the stacks of books piled up on the floor of his study. He reads eclectically in philosophy, science, history, and current affairs, and rereads a Jane Austen novel every year.
Hunter often speaks as if his role in the new movement were just something that fell upon him—and in the beginning that was more or less the case. In the autumn of 2005, Jim Ball, the head of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and Richard Cizik were gathering signatures for an Evangelical Climate Initiative and a statement expressing alarm about man-made global warming and calling for a mandatory curb on carbon emissions. “Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors,” the statement read. Hunter signed it, along with eighty-five other evangelical leaders, and, as a megachurch pastor in a state vulnerable to climate change, he was chosen to do a nationally broadcast television spot for the initiative. After that, he said, “one thing led to another.” But Hunter, who quickly saw the potential of the movement, worked hard to see that it did. In the spring of 2006, he published a new version of a book he had written in 1988, when Pat Robertson was running for President, in which he argued that the evangelical right confused the power of the Cross with the power of government and misunderstood the nature of American democracy. Evangelicals, he wrote, should participate in politics—indeed, as Christians and as citizens they had a duty to do so—but they should understand that they constituted a special-interest group, one of many in a pluralist society.

Around the time Hunter’s book was published, Roberta Combs, an acquaintance, invited him to succeed her as the president of the Christian Coalition. Founded by Pat Robertson, the Coalition had in the nineteen-nineties been the largest religious-right organization in the country, known for the millions of voting guides it distributed to churches, but it has lost members and financial support in recent years. Hunter’s friends were flabbergasted, but instead of rejecting the offer he presented the board with a proposal to turn the Coalition into a grassroots organization that would help pastors work on issues such as poverty and the environment. In view of the group’s financial deficits, the board members agreed, but, a month before Hunter was to formally take office, they parted ways, citing “differences in philosophy and vision.” The affair nonetheless brought him national press attention, and since then he has taken on active roles in other national evangelical organizations—Becky has become the president of the Global Pastors’ Wives Network—and he speaks all over the country on the issues he cares about.

Hunter, who does not like to be thought of as earnest, told me that he was having more fun than he had had since college. “This is like the most idealistic, visionary time of my life,” he said. In fact, he has brought together the two parts of his life that had been separated since the nineteen-sixties.

Born in 1948, in Shelby, a small county seat in northern Ohio, Hunter grew up well outside the evangelical orbit. His father, a decorated Second World War veteran, died of cancer when Joel was four, and his mother became an alcoholic. To support him and his older sister, she worked as a beautician. Three years later, she married a devout Catholic who worked in a carbon-paper factory. Joel attended a Methodist church with his grandparents, and went to public school. In 1966, he enrolled at Ohio University, where he majored in history and government, and was swept up in the student activism of the period. He didn’t demonstrate against the Vietnam War, because there were many military men in his family, but, as he remembers it, that was the exception: “If the mashed potatoes were lumpy in the cafeteria, we were out there with placards.” He believed that his generation would change the world, and he idolized Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. When they were assassinated and the student movement split into angry factions, Hunter’s disillusionment was profound. He turned to the religion of his youth, and, on graduating, went to seminary in Indianapolis.

Hunter spent fifteen years in the United Methodist Church, first as a youth pastor in Greenfield, Indiana, where he met and married Becky, who was a college student at the time, and later as a minister of a small rural church and as a pastor in a growing suburb of Indianapolis, where, under his leadership, the congregation grew from two hundred to a thousand in seven years. The United Methodist Church was a liberal Protestant denomination, but Hunter, inspired by one of his professors, had become a theological conservative and an evangelical. That hadn’t mattered to his congregations or to the denomination, which allowed its ministers latitude as long as they were building strong churches. At thirty-seven, he thought he had everything he could ask for: the second-largest church of its denomination in the state, a good salary (he and Becky by then had three young sons), and a new parsonage. But it made him uneasy. “There’s something in me as a child of the sixties that is very suspicious of establishment success,” he said. “I questioned if I was just doing it because of the perks. Did I really have what it takes to walk away from it?” He spent three days praying and fasting in a cabin in the woods, and, shortly afterward, accepted an offer from Northland, an evangelical congregation of two hundred people, which had just lost its pastor.

Ten years later, Hunter was preaching seven services a weekend to accommodate five thousand congregants. After 2001, the church found quarters in other parts of Orlando where services could be broadcast simultaneously; last year it completed construction of a larger building next to the old one, which is now linked interactively with Northland congregations at other sites, partner churches overseas, and Internet users.

Many megachurches have sports facilities, a day-care center, a school, and social clubs, but Northland has never had such amenities, and it has never used marketing techniques to attract congregants. It has grown mainly because of the worship services. Hunter doesn’t preach pop psychology or self-help messages or a basic introduction to Christianity. Beginning in 1991, he preached a ten-year series on achieving spiritual maturity, with each year devoted to a single topic. He is a populist preacher in the sense that he’s a good storyteller, witty and down to earth.

But his great gift, according to Reggie Kidd, a professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary, near Orlando, is his ability to find the profound in simple things and to explain difficult concepts in ways that are easy to understand. In 1996, when Hunter felt that the congregation was ready, he changed the emphasis of his preaching from individual faith and mutual service to the need to serve the community as a whole. “He pushed us out,” Lori Droppers, a physical therapist who has been going to Northland with her husband and children for more than ten years, said. “It’s not a church that wants to gather you in with people of the same mind-set.” Sometimes, she said, “I do long for the ‘holy huddle,’ but it’s the right thing to do.” Few at Northland have objected to Hunter’s recent public advocacy. He told me, “When people have heard you explain the Scriptures for twenty some years, and when they know that you’re centered theologically, then when you bring issues like that up they are much more inclined to suppose that it is the next level of spiritual witness.”

Asked why the religious right retained such a hold, Hunter began by evoking the sense of alarm that evangelicals felt during the cultural upheavals of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. “When you are angry or afraid, the loudest voices carry the day,” he said. Speaking of the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons, he added, “I think they showed some courage and some leadership getting us into the public square. But it’s like in the sixties—guys like Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown. When I heard those guys talk, I thought, That makes me mad, too! I can’t believe how this could be happening in our country! But the more you listen the more you go, ‘Wait a minute. I see where you’re coming from, and that has some legitimacy, but I’m not going to give my life to that.’ ”

The religious-right leaders were also intimidating. Radio and television evangelists, they built powerful organizations, and they held the microphone. “Who in the world was going to stand up to Jim Dobson?” Hunter asked. All pastors knew how many people listened to Dobson and Falwell and received voting guides from the Christian Coalition, and those who were still building their churches couldn’t afford to introduce any kind of controversy. “You have to come to a certain stature in what you’ve done to even be on a playing field with a Jim Dobson or Pat Robertson,” Hunter said. In his view, it took not only a change in evangelical attitudes but also the emergence of a new generation of leaders with power bases of their own to challenge the right.

Hunter and others have come under attack from what Richard Cizik refers to as “the enforcers” of the evangelical community. Rick Warren, for example, has been harshly criticized for inviting Barack Obama to an AIDS conference, and Hybels was attacked for asking Jimmy Carter to speak at a conference on leadership. Warren and Hybels can shrug off such assaults, but some less powerful leaders have removed their names from statements or otherwise backed down. Hunter told me, “In the evangelical community, all you have to do is get accused of compromising your theology and you’re automatically labelled a traitor or a heretic or whatever. So I understand the pressure on these guys.”

Of all the initiatives the new movement has taken, that on global warming has provoked the most fury from the right. Before the Evangelical Climate Initiative statement was released, in February of 2006, James Dobson, Richard Land, and others wrote to the N.A.E. saying that global warming was not a consensus issue, and they raised enough opposition on the board to prevent Cizik from signing it. The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a group supported by Dobson and other prominent right-wingers, argued that man-made global warming was an unproved theory and that policies designed to combat it would slow economic development and hurt the world’s poor. Dobson and Tony Perkins, among others, also protested that a campaign against global warming would distract evangelicals from their mission to oppose abortion and support family values; John Giles, of Christian Action Alabama, told the Financial Times that it was an attempt to divide evangelicals and weaken the right. The showdown came at the annual N.A.E. meeting in March of last year. Days earlier, Dobson and twenty-four other right-wingers, none of them N.A.E. members, wrote an open letter stating that Cizik had put forth “his own political opinions as scientific fact” and had used global warming to “shift emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.” They went so far as to suggest that Cizik, who had once spoken of the need for population control, might approve of abortion and infanticide, as practiced in China. This time, however, the board supported Cizik, and Hunter defended him publicly.

The conflict then moved to the Southern Baptist Convention. Last June, the S.B.C. passed an official resolution that questioned whether human activity contributes to global warming, and urged Southern Baptists to weigh the economic impact of policies designed to reduce greenhouse gases. Then Jonathan Merritt, a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, heard a professor say that destroying God’s creation was akin to tearing a page out of the Bible. After consulting with S.B.C. theologians, Merritt drafted a statement calling the denomination’s engagement with the environment “too timid,” and maintaining that “our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.” The statement, released in March, was signed by forty-five leading Southern Baptists, including Frank Page.

The new movement has come at a difficult time for the religious right. The death of Jerry Falwell, last May, followed by that of D. James Kennedy, a televangelist and a mainstay of the right, seemed to herald the passing of the founding generation of leaders. Then there was the embarrassment of the Republican primaries. Last fall, religious-right leaders contemplated a field of candidates that included a Mormon from Massachusetts; a thrice-married Catholic from New York; a non-churchgoing Hollywood actor; a senator who in 2000 had called Falwell and Robertson “agents of intolerance”; and a former Southern Baptist pastor. The choice might have seemed clear, but it was not. Pat Robertson, who had been out of step for some time, picked Rudy Giuliani, the candidate all the others thought anathema. Richard Land, who that fall had written that evangelicals ought to support a candidate they agreed with eighty per cent of the time on the moral issues, as opposed to one they agreed with a hundred per cent of the time, because the most moral candidate might divide the vote and allow the least moral to win, made it clear that Fred Thompson was his man. Operating on the same principle, other leaders signalled support for Mitt Romney. Only one of the top leaders came out for Mike Huckabee, and none chose the winner, John McCain. Then, when the televangelists John Hagee and Rod Parsley belatedly endorsed McCain, the Senator had to repudiate them, after Hagee was found to have made outrageous remarks about the Catholic Church and Jews, and Parsley to have attacked Islam. Their views had never been questioned when they supported George W. Bush.

The misfortunes of the right, coupled with the emergence of new evangelical leaders, have convinced a number of observers, notably E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, that the era of the religious right is over. Other experts, among them John C. Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, have called the obituaries for the right premature, if only because they have been written several times before. Still, at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in March, Dobson wondered “who will be left to carry the banner when this generation of leaders is gone.” He added, “The question is: will the younger generation heed the call?” The next day, Tony Perkins, aged forty-five, made the first bid for the succession. He had just written “Personal Faith, Public Policy,” with Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., an African-American pastor with a church outside Washington, D.C., and, at a conference designed to publicize it, the two argued that the religious right was a coalition and that the way to save it was to broaden the agenda to include poverty, social justice, racial reconciliation, and global warming. The book turned out to be a compilation of right-wing bromides about the virtues of self-reliance and the vices of government intervention in a free economy. It was nonetheless an hommage to the new movement.

Hunter doesn’t predict the imminent demise of the religious right but he believes that the coalition of social, economic, and foreign-policy conservatives that made up Bush’s Republican Party cannot last, because the new social conservatives will insist on public as well as private morality, and won’t put up with a government that deprives the needy by cutting taxes on the rich and whose foreign policy is directed only toward enhancing American power. “The younger generation, that’s what’s driving this thing,” Hunter said. “We’ve got a bunch of kids now who are just reminding us, ‘Quit playing to the categories. They don’t matter. Try to get things done. That’s what matters.’ ” Surveys of younger evangelicals support his view. According to Pew polls, while evangelicals aged eighteen to thirty care more about abortion than their elders, they are less bothered by gay marriage, more concerned about health care and the poor, and more likely to champion environmental causes. In a poll conducted by Relevant, a magazine read by young college-educated evangelicals, fifty-five per cent called themselves conservative on issues of personal morality, but only thirty-four per cent said they were economic conservatives, and a mere fourteen per cent said they were conservative on issues such as health care and poverty. Most were against the war in Iraq, and of the two-thirds who said they had voted for Bush a third said they wouldn’t do it again.

How much headway the movement is making among evangelicals nationally is a question that won’t be settled by the election results in November. For one thing, Americans change their party allegiances slowly. In 2006, seventy-two per cent of white evangelicals voted for Republican congressional candidates, though polls taken before the election showed a much more significant decline in their approval for the Party. The Democrats may well pick up more evangelical votes this year, but for reasons that could be circumstantial. The same polls that reported a third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee and forty-three per cent in Ohio voting Democratic in the primaries also showed that evangelicals were more concerned with jobs and the economy than with gay rights and abortion. That was not the case in 2004, but it was in 1992, when Bill Clinton took a third of the evangelical vote. A lot also depends on the candidates.

In Hunter’s church, many of the young are Obama enthusiasts, as are many educated young evangelicals. Last fall, Relevant readers, when asked who Jesus would vote for, picked Obama over all the other candidates then in the race, Republican and Democratic. In any case, Hunter and his colleagues haven’t endorsed a candidate or a political party. What they want is voters like Lori Droppers. “It was simple before—I just voted Republican,” Droppers said. “But now I don’t know.” With the help of her eighteen-year-old son, she was looking up on the Internet all the positions taken by the Republican and the Democratic candidates. “I’m confused,” she said. “And Joel is to blame.”

The campaign thus far has cheered Hunter. A registered Republican, he voted for Huckabee in the Florida primary on the ground that he was “the first iteration” of a new type of evangelical leader—someone who cared about climate change and the plight of the poor, and didn’t take himself all that seriously. “When I am looking for a candidate, I am looking for a person who doesn’t have his wallet or his gun where his heart should be,” he said at the time.

Hunter claims to be undecided about whom he will vote for in November. He gives McCain credit for having had the integrity “to go against the grain,” and he calls Obama “as fresh a face as we’ve had in a long time.” His hope is that whoever is elected will leave the country less polarized, but he’s not optimistic about the next several months. “Ultimately, the voices of coöperation will prevail,” Hunter said, “but I think it’s going to be a battle, and it’s going to get very nasty from now until November.” ♦
ILLUSTRATION: SEYMOUR CHWAST