Two recent books are reporting the death or at least the decline in political influence of the American Religious Right. This is the argument of E.J. Dionne in Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Dionne makes a case that the era of influence in politics by the Religious Right is over. Evangelicals, he believes, are moving away from the narrow political “wedge” issues such as gay marriage and abortion and in so doing becoming less vulnerable to being manipulated by a rightist political agenda.

Jim Wallis, in his new book, The Great Awakening, describes what he calls the “leveling of the praying field” as Democrats discover their religious roots and are willing to talk about the faith-basis of their commitments in the public square.

Both Wallis and Dionne describe the fact that the agenda of the Christian evangelical community is becoming broader and now includes issues such as poverty, AIDS, trafficking and human rights, and the environment. I know some Evangelicals for whom this is the case and I find these new developments to hold promise for the future.

And then along comes Mike Huckabee who is anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-evolution and who keeps winning, as he did again this weekend, despite numerous predictions of his demise. Sure, Huckabee won’t win the nomination of the Republican party, but with the number of delegates he is accumulating, he is becoming a significant power broker in the Republican party. He may even become the vice-presidential candidate. He will certainly have influence on policy.

The Religious Right is a political movement, as both Dionne and Wallis recognize, and it is not the same as Evangelical Christianity. But what both Dionne and Wallis may be underestimating is the enormous amount of movement building that has been diligently undertaken for so long by the political Religious Right, as Thomas Frank so brilliantly argues in What’s the Matter with Kansas? “While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence.” Dionne and Wallis are not, of course, leftists and they see beyond the limits of personal virtue. Wallis, in particular, is working hard on building another kind of movement. But are they underestimating the strength and endurance of the movement built by the Right over such a long time?

The issue is that these broader concerns are new for Evangelicals and the movement the political Religious Right built has not gone away—it has morphed into the Huckabee campaign and seems to be a great source of votes for this candidate. This does not mean that Evangelicals can’t also care about AIDS and the environment, but at the end of the day, the Huckabee success may show that the movement built by the Religious Right is proving to be more enduring at the grassroots than the interest of Rick Warren or Richard Cizik in AIDS or the environment. The change in the Evangelical agenda, if it is a change, seems, after this weekend, and from the way the Huckabee campaign is churning along, not to be as strong as the long-standing movement built by the political Religious Right. Another way to put this is, old habits die hard.

Long term, I hope and indeed I believe that Wallis and Dionne are correct; I am beginning to think, however, that their reports of the demise of the Religious Right may be premature.