September 16, 2010; Source: Right Side News | Take a gander at the lede in this article: “If this nation collapses in the 2010-2012 time frame, historians will have to report, if they are honest, that America fell because of silent pastors and inactive pews.” It is a statement from a pastor in San Diego, the founding director of the Pastor’s Rapid Response Team that was mobilized around California’s Proposition 8, the ballot measure passed in 2008 that overturned the state’s recognition of marriage between gays and lesbians.

The article takes evangelical church leaders to task, suggesting that for fear of losing their tax exemptions, evangelical churches stayed on the sidelines of the Prop 8 debate. The author says that the Mormon Church, representing only 2 percent of the California population, contributed “at least 40% of the funds to defend marriage.”

Moreover, the author says that 70 percent of African-Americans and 53 percent of Latinos voted to save traditional marriage from being weakened by the intrusion of gay marriage, compared to less than a majority of white voters. The author, a vice president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, says, “Evangelicals . . . stayed in the safety of their pews under the misguided tutelage of their frightened, disengaged pastors.”

A spokesperson for Restore America, self-defined as an “an evangelical ministry with the goal of awakening and mobilizing the Christian VOTE” (their capitalization), contends that Evangelicals “are the largest voting block (sic) in the nation” with 52 million eligible voters. But only 33 million of them voted in 2008 and only 21 million in 2006.—Rick Cohen