The Type Of Evangelicals Who Voted For Obama

Newsweek acknowledges that Evangelicals didn't vote for Barack Obama as much as expected, but profiles some Evangelicals who did vote for him:

Doug Paul struck out into unfamiliar territory during high school, after he read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The fatalism of that novella, its hopelessness about human redemption, made Paul question the value of Christian worship. With such doubts in his mind, he went on to Wheaton College in Illinois, the alma mater of the evangelist Billy Graham. There he met other Christians like him—questioning, politically engaged news junkies who confessed to each other that they were confused about God. "I basically became a functioning atheist," Paul says. "I hit reset, bulldozed my childhood education and started new." (Located in DuPage County, Wheaton exemplifies the kind of community that flipped for Obama. In 2004, Bush won DuPage by nearly 40,000 votes; in 2008, Obama won by 50,000.) In 2003, Paul was forced to leave Wheaton in disgrace. He had cheated his boss, for whom he worked summers selling books door-to-door, out of thousands of dollars by lying about his sales figures. (He eventually repaid his debt.) Infuriated, his parents yanked his tuition and allowed him to come back home on the condition that he return to church....

For Paul, as for so many evangelicals of his generation, the issue of gay rights drove a wedge in the already-widening gap between his elders and himself. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 26 percent of white evangelicals ages 18 to 29 support gay marriage, compared with 9 percent of white evangelicals older than 30. In 2006, as Virginia was preparing to vote on an amendment banning gay marriage, Southside Nazarene posted a sign near the road urging people to vote yes. SAVE OUR FAMILIES was emblazoned on the banner. Doug Paul remembers a particular Friday-night dinner with his parents that ended in silent fuming. He and his new wife, Elizabeth, were expecting a houseguest that weekend who was gay, and he expressed irritation that their church would propagate the idea that gay people preyed on children.

"I'm pretty sure I just burst out during the meal," he remembers. "I was like, 'Does this really make people feel welcome? Would we put up a sign that says SAVE US FROM ANGRY PEOPLE, or whatever other people we say have sinned?' " The table fell silent. "You could hear the clink of ice cubes in our glasses," he says. His parents say they don't remember the incident.

Paul credits Obama's campaign slogan—"Be the change you seek"—with helping him realize his dream of starting his own congregation. He prayed on the decision for months, going weekly to the driving range to think. He found the theology at Southside too punitive, its social outreach too limited. He and his peers were still pro-life, he explains, but tired of the narrow lens through which his pastors viewed the world....

Unlike Doug Paul, who voted for Kerry in 2004, Glisson had never voted for a Democrat before. Raised in a conservative suburb of Richmond, Glisson went to a Christian college and voted for George W. Bush—twice. But Obama's speech on race resonated with Glisson's own view that there are many paths to God, and Obama's position on abortion—legal but infrequent—made moral sense.