A lot of his points just restate each other, but I read it as three core points.

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

Replace will with already has. A good chunk of the failure of the Republican party in the last election can be attributed to the conflict between the religious wing and the rest of the party. I expect he is right about it getting worse for the fundamentalist evangelicals. The popularity driven mega-churches will simply switch to a more politically palatable position at some point.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.

A constant problem for religions. It's easy to generally shape the belief of your own kids, but unless a society is really repressive, it's hard to fix their exact beliefs.

This is a particular problem for Evangelicals because the movement is actually a bunch of different little movements under one umbrella. As soon as you start getting into the details you get into conflicts between the groups, so the leaders and teachers prefer to dwell on the generalities they share instead.

7. The money will dry up.

I'm sure there will be a big drop, but I'm not so sure it will have a big impact. A lot of the casual donations that will dry up go to superficial mega-church and TV preachers who spend most of it building new churches and on themselves. The money that drives a lot of the important background stuff actually comes from a handful of big donors, who are unlikely to cut back that much.

Jay

Remember the discussion of how Bush was a hero to the right, until he became an embarrassment and a liability, then they all realized that he was never a "real conservative". No one can prove that the "conservative agenda" is damaging to society, because someone will always say that a "real conservative agenda" has never been implemented.

On the one hand, I know where you are coming from and it is certainly a common way of jettisoning a now unpopular leader. On the other hand, you can make a good case that the Bush administration was neither politically or religiously conservative. The only thing the Bush administration was consistent about where authoritarian issues, even on business issues they where willing to shift with the political wind.

Jay