The article (here), which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on October 28^th, is about politics. David D. Kirkpatrick forecasts the shattering of the evangelical consensus in voting Republican - and, in my opinion, forecasts correctly. As far as most Times readers would be concerned, interest ends there.

That evangelicals will divide politically is no longer debatable. They've lost their love for Bush. Younger evangelicals are openly turning left. The current top-tier candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are, every one of them, ideologically mixed. (Giuliani is pro-abortion. Romney is Mormon. Thompson is not yet catching fire. McCain is McCain.) All of these factors promote division.

As the evangelical crackup transpires over the next year, the agonies will be no less exquisite for having been predicted. Evangelicals will wonder what it means to be a Christian in America.

What makes Kirkpatrick's piece significant to me is his sensitivity to the evangelical subculture. As a political reporter who covered conservatives in 2004, he witnessed evangelical enthusiasms at the grassroots. In this election cycle, he outlines the causes of their crackup in three categories of "latent divisions within the evangelical world - over the evangelical alliance with the Republican party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations."

The generational shift is most obvious. Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy are dead. The rest of their generation is retiring. James Dobson is still vigorous at 71, but Focus On the Family will probably do just as its name preaches in the coming years, rather than remaining the power-broker it became in the 1990s.

Right there, we're done with religious conservatism as we knew it.

Less obvious are dissatisfactions with the Republican party. The emergent church leaders have made clear they don't like Republicans. Donald Miller doesn't. Brian McLaren doesn't. They are anti-war, pro-environment, pro-social justice. Kirkpatrick notes, "White evangelicals under 30 - the future of the church - were once Bush's biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders." The "sharpest falloff" in evangelical identification with the Republican party is among the young.

The emergents pay attention to Jimmy Carter. Factor in the previous generation's, shall we say, disaffection from Carter, and you have an intense conflict.

But Kirkpatrick is onto the least obvious, and most significant, reason for the evangelical crackup. Many evangelical leaders have merged social conservatism with the gospel, and many of their followers no longer do so.

Terry Fox, a prominent conservative activist and pastor of a church of 6,000 in Wichita, Kansas, was recently forced to resign by his deacons. "They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!" said Fox. "And these were the deacons of the church!"

That is the astonishment of a pastor who doesn't know his job, in response to deacons who do know theirs. The pulpit is for the gospel, not for social activism, and Fox simply doesn't see a difference.

Kirkpatrick quotes another Wichita pastor who led protests against abortion in 1991, Gene Carlson. "I thought in my enthusiasm that somehow we could band together and change things politically and everything would be fine." Carlson became disillusioned when all the sound and fury changed little. He concluded, "When you mix politics and religion, you get politics."

A needed distinction between the message of the cross and today's talking points memo is being rediscovered.

The trouble is, with emergents steering toward liberal activism, that distinction may get blurred yet again. We seem to be in for another round of political disillusionment. Emergents claim that they are disentangling from the corruptions of Republicans, that they won't be used for political purposes like their naïve parents, but are equating the advancement of the Kingdom of God with transitory improvements in society. Improvements, as defined by people who think state action is the way to rebuild culture.

I am entirely convinced that the gospel must be preached not just with words, but with deeds of compassion. Here in Orland, by the grace of God, we are building a community based on exactly that premise.

But a herd of naïve evangelicals stampeding left rather than right is exactly what the Kingdom doesn't need. Believers have sung enough stanzas of the political hymn.