A few years back, the award-winning journalist and commentator, E.J. Dionne, Jr published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, detailing why he thought the era of the Religious Right — and the exploitation of faith for political advantage — was drawing to a close. Recently he reflected on the 2012 election season, how religious conservatism has evolved, the role of Rick Santorum, and to what extent he thinks the religious right’s rise to power has been a generational phenomenon. Read his post after the jump:

Souled Out Revisited: Rick Santorum and the Future of the Religious Right

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Writing four years ago in Souled Out, I offered this rather bold thought: “The era of the religious right is over. Its collapse is part of a larger decline of a style of ideological conservatism that reached high points in 1980 and 1994 but suffered a series of decisive — and I believe fatal — setbacks during George W. Bush’s second term.”

As if in reply to me, and to many others who wrote along these lines during and after the 2008 election, David Gibson, the thoughtful writer on religious matters, put this headline on his  March 14, 2012 Religious News Service article: “Santorum shows the Religious Right isn’t dead yet.” Gibson went on to write:

      If [Rick] Santorum finds a way to beat [Mitt] Romney — not to mention beat Obama in November — it would be an unprecedented boost for the Religious Right.

     Outcomes, however, are almost as irrelevant as they are unpredictable. Even if Santorum finishes second to Romney, his successes so far have made his point, and ensured that Christian conservatives cannot be ignored — and their leaders have to be heeded.

So which is it: Is the Religious Right dead or alive?

First, I’ll begin by acknowledging that religious conservatism is electorally stronger than I expected it to be four years after Barack Obama’s victory. My operating assumption has been that just as the Great Depression put an end to the dominance of our politics in the 1920s by cultural and religious concerns (e.g., Prohibition and Al Smith’s Catholicism), so would the Great Recession usher in a period in which more secular and practical concerns would dominate the public debate.

In the longer run, I still believe this to be true. As I’ll be arguing in a moment, the fact that religious conservatism remains an important force inside the Republican Party does not mean its strength is growing outside Republican ranks. In fact (and here I am holding on to my prediction), religious conservatism continues to grow weaker everywhere except inside the G.O.P., in significant part because the Millennial generation, whose influence in politics is destined to grow, holds views quite at odds with those of the religious right. A telling example: if religious conservatives were truly still in the ascendency, the gay rights movement would not have made the progress it enjoyed over the last four years.

And the Republican presidential contest itself presents something of a mixed picture. That Mitt Romney maintains a big delegate lead and is the most likely of the four remaining candidates to win the nomination speaks to the limits of the power of the Religious Right. Romney, who would become the first Mormon president in our history were he elected, has been held back from talking about his own faith by a desire not to stir up anti-Mormon feeling. But if Romney does win the nomination, it suggests that the religious conservatives do not enjoy a veto power over the identity of the nominee (something John McCain’s nomination in 2008 had already shown).

That said, Santorum’s strength shows that the religious conservatives were neither wiped out by the 2008 election nor displaced as a Republican force by the Tea Party. It’s significant that Santorum’s ability to win a primary or caucus rested largely on the share of the vote cast in any given contest by white evangelicals. Of the 16 states that have had exit or entrance polls, Santorum has carried five. In those five states, the share of the electorate that described itself as evangelical or “born again” averaged 69 percent. Romney carried nine of those states — and in the Romney states, the evangelical share averaged only 33 percent. (Newt Gingrich carried two states, South Carolina and Georgia both with an evangelical share of 64 percent.) There is a clear religious divide in the G.O.P.

And the failure of the Tea Party to displace the Religious Right owes to the fact that many members of the Tea Party are also religious conservatives. A survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute before the 2010 elections found that 47 percent of those who considered themselves part of the Tea Party movement also identified as part of the Religious Right or the Christian Conservative movement. The attitudes of Tea Party members were even more closely in line with those of religious conservatives; for example, two-thirds of Tea Party members said that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. The Tea Party, in short, never became a full-blown alternative to the religious conservative movement. For many conservatives, it was simply an additional vehicle for political action.

So in one sense, David Gibson’s observation is quite correct: the Religious Right did not suddenly disintegrate and it remains an important force in the Republican Party. But in the long run, I remain persuaded that its power peaked during the Bush years and will recede over time. That’s because the Religious Right is a generational phenomenon – its supporters are older Americans, even as younger Americans strongly resist its approach both to religious matters and to public concerns. And its power in the GOP primaries reflects the fact that Republican voters are substantially older than the nation as a whole, and older also than the general electorate.

Writing in National Journal, Ron Brownstein noted that in “12 of the 16 states where exit polls have been conducted, voters over 50 cast at least 60 percent of the GOP primary votes; in the other four, they represented at least 55 percent of the vote.”  Religious conservatism is more likely to be yesterday’s movement than tomorrow’s.

There are other arguments in Souled Out that bear on our current politics, notably the battle inside the Catholic Church between liberals and an increasingly powerful conservative wing. (Rather than make an already long blog longer, I’d note that I have written about these issues in recent Washington Post columns — click here and here for examples.)  The controversy over the contraception mandate suggests that religious concerns are never far from the surface of American politics. And that’s why I continue to insist on the larger argument I made four years ago: Religion will continue to flow in and around American politics as long as we remain a free society in which a large number of our citizens remain people of faith. Conservatives need to be more open to the idea that faith will lead many Americans in liberal and progressive directions. Liberals need to be more open to the idea that religion will inevitably play a large role in our politics — and that this is not something to be feared.

E. J. Dionne Jr. is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, a regular political analyst on National Public Radio, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. His books include the best-selling Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon & Schuster), which won the Los Angeles Times book prize and was nominated for the National Book Award.