SINCE 1992, every national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an obituary for the religious right. Every one of these obituaries has been premature -- after these losses, the religious right only grew stronger. [    ]

The conventional wisdom about the Democratic thumping of Republicans last week says something a little different about the religious right -- that its members are beginning to migrate to the Democratic Party. The statistic that is exciting Democrats the most is that nearly 30 percent of white evangelicals, the true Republican base, voted Democratic. In addition, the red-blue split of weekly churchgoers has narrowed. Commentators are atwitter about the shrinking "God gap."

Once again, the conventional wisdom is wrong. [  ]

So before rearranging their public policy agenda in hopes of attracting evangelicals, the Democrats would be wise to think twice. There has been a radical change in the attitudes of evangelicals -- it's just not one that will automatically be in the Democrats' favor.

You see, evangelicals aren't re-examining their political priorities nearly as much as they are re-examining their spiritual priorities. That could be bad news for both political parties. [  ]

Beliefnet.com's post-election online survey of more than 2,000 people revealed that nearly 40 percent of evangelicals support the idea of a two-year Christian "fast" from intense political activism. [  ]

Don't expect conservative Christians in politics to start to disappear, of course. There are those who find the moral force of issues like abortion and gay marriage equal to that of the abolition of slavery -- worth pursuing no matter what the risks of politics are for the soul. But the advocates working these special interests may, I think, be far fewer in coming years than in years past. [   ]

We will have to wait until 2008 to see just how deep this evangelical spiritual re-examination goes, and how seductive politics will continue to be to committed Christians. Meanwhile, evangelicals aren't flocking to the Democratic Party. If anything, they are becoming more truly conservative in their recognition of the negative spiritual consequences of political obsession and of the limitations of government power.

C. S. Lewis once warned that any Christian who uses his faith as a means to a political end would corrupt both his faith and the faith writ large. A lot of Christians are reading C. S. Lewis these days.