Over at Religion Dispatches, our friend Robby Jones has a terrific essay about the concurrent rise of progressive religious leaders and decline of the old religious right. (Seriously, I'm not just saying that because he has nice things to say about FPL.)

Walking us through some of the key examples, he takes us from the religious gridiron of Ohio to the national scene to the airwaves, he shows the right's waning fortunes on multiple fronts as progressive religious groups find their voices. It's impossible to clip a fully representative excerpt from such a broad essay, but this passage hits many key notes:

In the meantime, Ohio Christians clearly voiced their preference for a candidate that shared all their values rather than a candidate running on a narrow divisive platform of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Blackwell was handily defeated by Ted Strickland, a Methodist minister who stumped as a “Golden Rule Democrat” and who, as a senator, insisted on paying for his own health coverage as long as his constituents were not covered. According to the 2006 NEP exit polls, Strickland gained fourteen points among voters who attended religious services once per week or more, compared to support these voters gave Senator John Kerry in 2004. And voters, including a majority (fifty-one percent) of weekly church attenders, overwhelmingly supported a long-overdue ballot measure to increase the minimum wage.

Especially since 2006, I have been struck (and heartened) by the contrast in the energy, new ideas, and accomplishments among progressive religious groups and the flagging, tired efforts to trot out the same old lines among the religious right. Just two more examples hammer this point home. First, it is worth noting that the once-formidable Christian Coalition, founded in 1989, has virtually imploded. By 2006, its $26 million budget had shrunk to $1 million, and it was $2 million in debt; and its state chapters have been steadily folding or disassociating because the group has become so associated with a narrow, divisive agenda—an agenda of which Americans, including evangelical Americans, have grown weary.

Second, progressive religious voices have moved from being reactive to proactive. In 2004, progressives were on the defensive, having been largely caught off guard by the successful (and distorting) “values voter” campaign. Three of the largest groups on the religious right—the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Focus on the Family (FOF) and its associated Family Research Council (FRC)—jointly launched this strategy as the “I Vote Values” campaign on April 15, 2004. This coalition effort involved mirrored websites, with SBC hosting ivotevalues.com and FOF/FRC hosting ivotevalues.org. The fact that progressives are still fighting off the misleading stereotypes of “values voters” in the media is testimony to that effort’s relative success.

Well worth a full read.