Credit to the NYT‘s Michael Luo and Laurie Goodstein for looking beyond the new conventional wisdom on evangelicalism in a report headlined to reflect the wishes of the Times‘ “centrist” perspective: “Emphasis Shifts for New Breed of Evangelicals.” Actually, not so much, the Pew deans of evangelical surveying (you shall know them by their poll numbers) tell Luo and Goodstein: abortion is still right at the top as a force that gives American evangelicals meaning.

What’s changed, write the reporters, is style — Rick Warren’s Hawaiian shirts substituted for Falwell’s Southern thumper suits. What the story misses is that so far, style, not substance, defines the emergence of new “issues” on the evangelical agenda, such as global warming and poverty. The NYT and Pew interpret this as evidence of “centrism,” without discussing the conservative energy the evangelical movement brings to these issues. Warren isn’t joining the liberal crusade, much less the leftist fight, against poverty — he’s reviving the good-natured, laissez-faire Ronald Reagan style. That style has roots in American evangelicalism, as it happens, going back to the conservative evangelical activists of the 1930s, who argued that economic malaise was a reflection of spiritual suffering, and ought to fought on the spiritual plane.