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WWED: What will evangelicals do?

When longtime evangelical leader James Dobson endorsed Mike Huckabee for president last week, how many voters were listening? Polls and scholars suggest not as many as in the past.

In fact, surveys say the same voters who catapulted George H.W. Bush and his son into the White House favor Democrats in this year’s presidential election, spurred by a new generation of evangelical leaders.

Concerns about poverty and health care have made the evangelical vote that Republicans have come to expect much more of a wild card, reports George Barna in the latest survey by his Christian polling firm.

Many scholars attribute the shift to a new generation of evangelical kingmakers entering the political conversation, including author and activist Rev. Jim Wallis, Rev. Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and Lynne Hybels, wife of Rev. Bill Hybels, senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. They support the theory that conservative power brokers such as Dobson no longer have the clout to dictate how evangelicals should vote.

In Wallis’ latest book "The Great Awakening," he calls for a politics of solutions for hunger, poverty and health care and reminds readers that faith was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery and civil rights. From Wheaton to Winnetka, Wallis will tour the Chicago area next week.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez, "the Karl Rove of Latino evangelical strategy," told my colleague Margaret Ramirez that conservative evangelicals of the past have discouraged platforms that don’t address abortion or gay marriage.

"The agenda of the evangelical church in America has been two-fold since 1973: It has been sanctity of life and traditional marriage. ... It’s almost blasphemous to go beyond those two items," he said. "Now, the Hispanic evangelical comes along and says there are other items that we need to look at. What about alleviating poverty, from a biblical view? What about health care and education? What about speaking against torture? What about human rights?"

But Lynne Hybels insists that the evangelical community has never been a one- or two-issue voting bloc.

"The silence of moderate and progressive Christians has perpetuated a narrow view of evangelicals," she said, breaking her own silence. (In the past, she worried that anything she said might be construed as political and get Willow into hot water.)

"Evangelicals committed to the fight against poverty and injustice, both locally and globally, have been working, volunteering, funding and praying about those issues for decades," she continued. "Finally, their voices have become prominent in the political conversation."

Indeed, Michael Lindsay, author of the book "Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite" said about 70 percent of today’s evangelicals simply don’t identify with the Religious Right.

Lindsay said reporters and pundits should be careful not to confuse evangelicals with Republican conservatives. Exit polls on Super Tuesday illustrate Lindsay’s point.

According to a post-election survey conducted by Faith in Public Life and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, nearly 340,000 white evangelical Democrats in Missouri and Tennessee favored Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But one would never know from reading the exit polls that day because pollsters only asked Republicans if they were evangelical, said Katie Barge of Faith in Public Life, the non-profit organization that co-sponsored the survey.

Those exit polls also failed to note that white evangelicals in both states ranked jobs and economy as the most important issues in deciding how to vote, far outnumbering those who considered abortion and same-sex marriage most important.

What issues do you consider most important when you vote? Do you look to any particular religious leaders for guidance?