Evangelical Resentment

I was about to retire for the morning and go do the Sunday crossword when I refreshed The Corner and saw this latest post from John O'Sullivan, a man I admire immensely. Reflecting on my theme that young evangelicals are more aligned with the left than with conservatives, he states:

...it seems to me to be a mistake for Cornerites and other conservatives to scorn Huckabee as a candidate whose appeal is limited to evangelicals (if indeed it is, which is far from certain.) The evangelical constituency is no longer firmly in the GOP camp. Many evangelicals, especially younger ones, are nervous that they have sold their faith for a mess of economic pottage—and not even got the pottage. Contempt for Huckabee will strengthen that burgeoning resentment.

While I agree with John O'Sullivan that there is 'burgeoning resentment' among evangelicals, I'm not sure its source is conservative scorn. Certainly, conservatives have been hard on Huckabee - I've been pretty hard on him myself. But pointing out the many intellectual and policy disagreements we have with Mike Huckabee, it seems to me, is pretty much a duty for conservative public commentators. The same has been done for McCain, Giuliani, and Romney, none of whom, to put it mildly, is a perfect conservative. Huckabee has veered from conservatism orthodoxy more often than the others so he's gotten hit harder. It's as simple as that. If evangelicals now bristle with resentment due to criticism of a candidate they support, it shows they have truly moved left, into the realm of identity politics.

But back to my original point. If there truly is 'burgeoning resentment' among evangelicals, where did it originate? Why, with Mike Huckabee himself. Huckabee cultivates this resentment every time he speaks to an audience of evangelicals. He pits his own candidacy against the field as an us vs. them proposal. He states that evangelicals have been taken for granted by the Republican party and that they are only accepted as part of the coalition so long as they simply show up every few years and vote the correct way. Now that one of their own has a possibility of winning, Huckabee implies that those opposed to his candidacy are opposed to it, not due to his record and policy positions, but because of his religious faith - a truly startling claim considering that a broad coalition of Republicans and conservatives has twice elected the current evangelical president. Throughout the campaign, Huckabee has slyly portrayed any criticism of him by the party faithful as anti-Christian bigotry.

A rift between evangelicals and the rest of the Republican coalition would probably have occurred eventually - young evangelicals had been moving left long before they heard of Mike Huckabee. But Huckabee has purposely hastened that rift, and made it more damaging to the future of the Republican party than it might otherwise have been.