Sharlet: Laurie Goodstein’s NYT Week in Review essay this past Sunday, “For a Trusty Voting Bloc, Faith Shaken,” sums up the new media master narrative on Christian conservatives and politics. That’s not a dig. The NYT Week in Review exists to forge conventional wisdom out of the oftentimes well-informed opinions of reporters who spend the rest of the week on the beat. Problems arise when those reporters pile their insights atop a pyramid of old cliches. That’s what seems to have happened here: Noting that no GOP candidate has won the widespread support of Christian conservatives, Goodstein suggests that Christian conservatives have become for the Republican Party something like black voters are to the Democratic Party — a necessary base that nonetheless doesn’t drive the agenda. Such an argument rests on several media generalizations, useful to daily reporting but not really representative of reality.

Let’s leave the ugliness of the analogy between African-Americans — historically and currently oppressed — and the mostly white evangelicals that comprise the Christian conservative movement — historically and currently beneficiaries of government — aside. The real problem here is with Goodstein’s reduction of Christian conservatism to a voting bloc, as if movements exist for the sake of the elected officials who’re sometimes able to ride their waves. Christian conservatism may not anoint a presidential candidate for the GOP, but that, as one activist, Rick Scarborough, tells Goodstein, isn’t really the point: “It’s not about winning elections. It’s about honoring Christ.”

Unfortunately, Goodstein leaves it that — which is to say, she leaves unexamined the meaning of that seemingly humble phrase. What does “honoring Christ” mean for a movement zealot like Scarborough, one of the most pugnacious evangelical activists on the scene? Scarborough considers himself a culture warrior. That means he thinks in terms not just of electoral politics, but of cultural politics — the kind, for instance, that create an atmosphere in which a Democrat in Mississippi out-fundamentalists his Republican opponent, and several Democratic candidates for president talk about God more than the Republicans.

Ah, but there I go, too — falling into the trap of electoral politics, going for the big cheese of Washington. Religious power in America has always been more complicated than what happens in Washington. Evangelicals are, indeed, weakened in the capitol; but it’ll take more than news stories like Goodstein’s to prove that they’ve been sent into exile.