This article on changes in the Religious Right is interesting in itself, saying how the old hard-core conservative leaders have either died or are no longer listened to, and how evangelical Christians are now going beyond sex and abortion issues to work also for “compassionate” issues, such as improving the environment and battling AIDS in Africa. The article also raises another issue, though, that Christians are finding that non-Christians’ identifying Christianity with right-wing conservatism, which they hate and fear, has become a major obstacle to evangelism. An excerpt from the article:

Bush’s fall from grace has also highlighted a spiritual reality as evangelicals have begun to sense just how damaging the fusion of Bush and Jesus has been to the perception of our Christian faith.

Beliefnet’s poll revealed that a third of all evangelicals now believe that Christian political activism is “damaging to Christianity.” This isn’t an isolated poll. As Christian pollster David Kinnaman writes, “The number of young people in our culture who now embrace unflattering perspectives about Christians and politics is astounding. Three-quarters of young [non-Christians] and half of young churchgoers describe present-day Christianity as ‘too involved in politics.’ ” Twenty percent of all evangelicals believe that adopting a conservative Christian political agenda has helped destroy the image of Jesus Christ.

For a community of believers such as evangelicals, for whom sharing Jesus’s life-giving message is an essential part of life, this is a shock. It’s evidence of misplaced priorities, of focusing far more on the city of man than on the City of God.

Good point? Or are non-Christians going to hate Christianity no matter what? Should Christians try to be more popular in the name of evangelism? Or is that just more trust in our human efforts at persuasion rather than the power of the Holy Spirit to bring people to faith? One prominent Christian writer has said that Christians should drop anti-abortion activism, since this has become an obstacle to evangelism. How can Christians sort out their spiritual and their earthly missions?

(Hint: Try applying the doctrine of the two kingdoms. How would this work in practice?)

Amy Sullivan is the nation editor for “Time Magazine.” She is a liberal (naturally) and also an evangelical Christian (surprisingly). She has written an op-ed piece, based on a forthcoming book, on being an evangelical liberal in the Democratic party. I was especially struck by her description of just how religiously bigoted the Democratic establishment had become over the last decade, though now the party, tired of losing so often and inspired by Barack Obama’s call for inclusion, is trying to change that:

A few months ago, while participating in an early-morning panel discussion in the heart of Manhattan, I was startled fully awake when a man stood up to declare that Democrats who reached out to religious voters, especially evangelicals, were akin to those who collaborated with the Nazis. I put on a sweet smile of Christian charity and counted to 10.

Comments like that explain why so many of us liberals who also happen to be evangelicals have stayed in the closet for so long. . . .

Democrats weren’t just passive nonactors who stood by helplessly while the GOP claimed Christ for itself. Instead of pushing back against conservatives’ insistence that Democrats aren’t religious, the party beat a hasty retreat, ceding the high ground in the competition for religious Christian voters and discussions of morality. The religious divide in U.S. politics that emerged — call it the God gap — represented as much a failure by Democrats as it did an achievement by Republicans.

The first religious bloc that professional Democrats wrote off was the evangelicals, despite the fact that fully 40 percent of born-again Christians describe themselves as politically moderate. Then party officials started to steer clear of Catholic voters, spooked by their opposition to abortion. Michael Dukakis’s 1988 campaign was the first in Democratic history to turn down all invitations to appear at Catholic venues.

Thus isolated, the professionals who run Democratic campaigns fell into a self-reinforcing spiral of misconceptions about the faithful. As being religious became not just declasse but downright dangerous in Democratic circles, religious Democrats silenced themselves.

Contrary to my usual custom, I really don’t have anything to say about the Academy Awards. I tried to watch some of the show, but I found it insufferable and had to turn away. Which raised another question in my mind: Is it really true lately that movies influence the culture? I think we are seeing the dysfunction evident in the rest of the arts, in which the “high culture” of the artsy elite has become culturally irrelevant, while the “pop culture” of the money-makers simply conforms to whatever trends are out there.

Our nation’s newspaper of record is getting slammed by its own watchdog for publishing without a shred of evidencethat story about John McCain insinuating that he had an illicit affair : Read what the New York Times ombudsman had to say.