Jim Wallis met recently with the leader of an evangelical mega-church, who told him, "I'm a conservative on Jesus, the Bible and the Resurrection, but I'm becoming a social liberal." When Wallis asked why, he heard what has become a familiar refrain: evangelicals are increasingly despairing over the neglect of the poor and the environment, and the U.S.'s inaction on fighting the genocide in Darfur.

Evangelical groups are defying the notion that they move together as one gargantuan conservative amoeba and are finding their voice on many progressive issues. U2 frontman Bono has talked extensively of the partnership he has forged with evangelical leaders in fighting the AIDS crisis. One of those leaders is Ted Haggard, a staunch Republican who founded the 12,000-member New Life Church and heads the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard counseled British Prime Minister Blair on how to persuade President Bush to support Third World debt relief and has made the environment a central issue of concern for his church.

In February, Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine, ran a cover story called "Why Torture Is Always Wrong." Catholics and evangelicals recently joined to support an immigration bill that would help illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens. And earlier this year, evangelical leaders launched a campaign to educate Christians about climate change and urged Congress to work on curbing global warming. The group released a poll showing that 70 percent of evangelicals believe global warming will pose a serious threat to future generations.

Haggard told the Denver Post: "We blew it with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. My generation's opportunity to blow it is to say we shouldn't deal with the environment because that's a liberal issue. Well, civil liberties was a liberal issue, and we were on the wrong side of that."

Wallis reports a marked increase in attendance of his speeches on Christian campuses, and the issue he gets asked about the most is not gay marriage or abortion. He says abortion will naturally remain an important issue to the moderate evangelical voter, but it is not a litmus test. These voters want leaders who will acknowledge their moral concerns about this issue and who are committed to decreasing the number of abortions, a position that puts them well within the mainstream of Democratic voters.

In fact, the Democratic Party already counts a group that is socially conservative on abortion and gay marriage as one of its most loyal constituencies: African-Americans. Sixty-one percent of African-Americans in Ohio supported an initiative banning same-sex marriages.

THREE CAMPS—John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, divides evangelicals into three camps: traditionalist (right wing), centrist, and modernist. Green's polling reveals that the first two camps are roughly the same size within the evangelical fold, each accounting for approximately 40 to 50 percent. The politically liberal modernist evangelicals are a small minority. Forty-eight percent of centrists are registered Republicans, 30 percent are Democrats, and 22 percent are Independents. Cathleen Falsani, religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and an evangelical Christian, refers to these voters as "Jesus-centric centrists . . . who take their faith seriously but don't let Jerry Falwell set their agenda."

Falsani believes the underserved portion of the evangelical movement—moderate to liberal voters—could swing elections in the Democratic Party's favor if Democrats were serious about talking to them. Falsani relies on polling information to support her contention, but also likes to point to her personal experience as a graduate of Wheaton College, the Christian Evangelical school that counts the Rev. Billy Graham as an alumnus. According to Falsani, of her five college roommates, who are all evangelical Christians, four call themselves liberals and one considers herself a moderate. In 2004, three voted for Kerry, one for Bush and one opted not to vote at all, due to what she considered the lackluster options. Hardly a conservative monolith.

When asked to rank national issues in their order of importance by Pew Research's 2004 Survey of Religion and Politics, centrist evangelicals listed economic and welfare issues above cultural ones, such as abortion and gay marriage, by about 20 points. For traditionalists, those numbers were reversed. Interestingly, taxing the rich instead of the middle class won overwhelming support from all evangelicals, even traditionalists, who backed it by a wide margin. But reinforcing Tom Frank's thesis in What's the Matter with Kansas—that many Americans vote against their economic self-interest in favor of their "values"—traditionalists rated cultural issues as their top priority.

In a 2005 speech, former President Bill Clinton spoke of a minister of the largest Pentecostal church in Louisiana, who opposes gay marriage and abortion, but voted for Clinton twice. The pastor unenthusiastically voted for Bush after Clinton left office. He told Clinton, "I have got mixed feelings about this Iraq thing. I hate those tax cuts. I don't like the deficits. I think kicking all these poor kids out of after school programs is outrageous." So why vote for Bush? He told Clinton, "Because ever since you left, nobody in your party talks to us anymore."