Reading the religious right’s post-election tea leaves.

Jason C. Bivins, author of The Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, and D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (subtitles tell the tale),read the tea leaves. Bivins first:

As I watched Jesse Jackson weeping in Grant Park, I decided to forget the Reverend’s own campaign nastiness and thought instead of Psalms 30:5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” And then I thought about “Chocolate City,” the 1975 Parliament ode to my hometown: “They still call it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition too.” Bafflingly, improbably, Starchild got it right.

Read more at ReligionDispatches.org. Bivins hits a different note over at Immanent Frame, which is sort of a much-smarter Revealer, without the laffs:

So while we may see a shift in representative figures, a recalibration of strategies, and so forth, the larger political context will likely prove far more intransigent, unless and until the quality of public discourse and participation changes. I expect that the rhetorics of embattlement and violence will remain powerful, and their clangor lively in the resonance chambers of American public life.

Which is to say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. D. Michael Lindsay, a more conservative scholar with his finger on the pulse of elite evangelicalism, sees the future along the same lines:

Is the Obama presidency the final nail in the coffin for the Religious Right? Don’t count on it. For one thing, political movements like the Religious Right don’t need a “god” to succeed, but they do need a devil. Nothing builds allegiances among a coalition like a common enemy.

Ah, but who will lead them? Lindsay offers some perceptive predictions—not Palin, who must choose between obscurity or moderation if she’s to survive; more likely Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal–but I think it’s the wrong question. Much of the media is going to forget all about Christian conservatives now, just like they did in 1992, 1996, 2006, and, for that matter, 1925, when the death of William Jennings Bryan following the Scopes monkey trial supposedly spelled the end of fundamentalism in America. Journalists with a deeper sense of history, meanwhile, will be nosing around the wreckage of the old Christian Right, searching for the movement’s new Moses. But American evangelicalism, particularly the politicized, conservative variety, is not a Moses movement. It endures because, despite its reverence for authority, most of its members believe in a higher authority than that of whichever ambitious pol or preacher says he (or, occasionally, she) is speaking for the masses. And what is that authority decreeing right now? That’s the question, and it won’t be answered on Sunday chat shows.

My prediction? I don’t have one. But I know where to look: “the stories we tell ourselves in order to live,” as Joan Didion famously put it. The anti-same sex marriage movement is surely one fo them, but there are others less noticed by the press: I’m reading the surprise Christian bestseller The Shack, and buying a ticket for the evangelical movie of the moment, Fireproof.

–Jeff Sharlet