The FundamentaList: This week in the religious right:

This week in the religious right: Latino evangelicals may play a decisive role in future elections, Dobson says Obama has a "fruitcake" interpretation of the Constitution, and culture wars continue in Texas.

Sarah Posner | June 25, 2008 | web only

1. Are White Evangelicals a Voting Bloc of the Past?

By the 2012 election they will be, says the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the 15 million-member National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. The NHCLC, which Rodriguez describes as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference blended with the National Association of Evangelicals and "a little Taco Bell," represents one of the fastest-growing religious groups in America. Rodriguez says that "in 20 to 30 years, Latino evangelicals will dominate ... what they believe in socially and politically will influence presidential campaigns." And presidential campaigns, says Rodriguez, "won't be about courting white evangelicals exclusively." "After 2012," he says, "there's no way you can move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue without the Latino vote."

Rodriguez, who describes himself as a centrist and is frequently mentioned as a standard-bearer of the emerging evangelical center, maintains that courting the Latino vote, and the evangelical Latino vote in particular, will drive both parties to the center. As one of the attendees at the meeting Barack Obama had with Christian leaders a few weeks ago, Rodriguez said he already detected such movement in the Democratic nominee. But what impressed him the most, he said, was that Obama "is a man of character and integrity and is speaking the language of Christianity" better than Kerry or Gore did.

Whether Obama's adeptness at talking about religion will be the key to him winning over evangelicals, and whether Rodriguez's predictions about the power of the Hispanic evangelical vote are correct, remains to be seen. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Religious Landscape Survey, white evangelicals still constitute about 80 percent of the roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population that is evangelical; Hispanics only 7 percent, much smaller than the segment of Catholics who are Hispanic (29 percent). Nonetheless, Hispanics are becoming increasingly evangelical (and many Catholic Hispanics are Pentecostal) and tend to be more Republican than their Catholic counterparts.

Rodriguez said he was very impressed by Obama's evangelical outreach, and, although he criticized McCain's anemic relationship with evangelicals, he expressed admiration for McCain's work on immigration. But he admitted that Obama may have a tough road with Latinos who worry that he would "put them aside." And about white evangelicals (for whom he said race and Obama's name would be a negative factors), Rodriguez said, "if they're truly born-again Christians and really want to do the right thing according to Scripture, what would Jesus do, they should really have a conversation on race."

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_062508