While there are certainly differences within the leadership of the Religious Right over which candidate to support, it would be foolhardy to consider these differences irreconcilable.

Commenting on the rift within the Religious Right, NewsMax's Tom Squitieri recently wrote that Robertson's endorsement "created a schism among evangelical Republicans -- one that may cost the GOP the White House next year." Squitieri pointed out that a major backlash has been under way in the evangelical community over the endorsement."

People for the America Way's RightWingWatch recently picked up on the in-fighting-within-the-Party-as-a-whole theme, pointing to a piece "suggesting that moderate Republicans are growing increasingly weary of the stranglehold the Religious Right has had on the Republican Party for the last several years and that efforts by presidential candidates to pander to the likes of James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Pat Robertson are only alienating them further."

Scott Reed, who managed Republican Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, told the Wall Street Journal's John Harwood that there's "a sense that the leadership of the Republican Party is too beholden to a small group of self-appointed social conservative leaders."

There is 'unsettledness,' says  Minnery, but no 'crack-up'

Minnery told PoliticsWest that such articles as David Kirkpatrick's "The Evangelical Crackup," which appeared in the October 28 edition of the New York Times Magazine was "typical of what we see during election cycles."

Minnery pointed out that after Pat Robertson failed in his bid for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1988, "There were wide predictions of a crackup; of the Moral Majority back then, of evangelicals. Then, of course, the Christian Coalition immediately rose up and became very strong. When that organization faded, there were another spate of stories about the crackup of evangelical Christians as an influence in the public square."

"What did we see then? Well, as recently as 2004, we saw 11 out of 11 states that had state marriage amendments on the ballot, passed them all by landslide proportions, except for liberal Oregon, which passed it with a 57 percent majority. And the exit polls in the 2004 election astonished a number of reporters when the single issue that brought most of them to the polls - as elucidated in the exit polls - was social, moral issues, such as marriage, such as the decline of our culture. And that astonished reporters."

"So, obviously, there was a big stick swung by social conservatives in the 2004 election. The fact that George Bush won in Ohio, that very key state, because a lot of people turned out for the marriage amendment in that particular state, was deemed to be significant. Now, we're into another cycle and the normal predictions of the crackup of evangelicalism is occurring. One of the phenomenon that gives rise to that, of course, is the fact that there is no single conservative candidate who has enough marbles for everybody in the conservative movement to want to play with. Everybody's lacking in something. Partially, this is just the way it is. People will have to figure it out, who to support. So there's some unsettledness. But I'd hardly call that a crack-up."

Splitting endorsements

Over the past several weeks, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani received the endorsement of Pat Robertson, while other candidates have received significant support from other evangelical leaders. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, seen by some as the one fundamentalist Christian in the field that also has a streak of economic populism, has received endorsements from such evangelical leaders as Janet Folger, president of Faith2Action (website), Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America (website), the Rev. Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye, longtime influential conservative activists: He is the co-author of the wildly popular "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic novels, and she is the founder of Concerned Women of America.

At the same time Huckabee was stitching together support from Christian leaders, a Robert Novak column entitled "The False Conservative," maintained that while "Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative ... serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist, big-government advocate of a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans."

Despite the fact that Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, has stated unequivocally that he would not support a Giuliani candidacy, Tom Minnery doesn't see the Constitution Party, a far-right entity, as being capable of siphoning off a significant number of evangelical votes. Minnery believes that should Giuliani become the nominee, "a lot of people on our side would probably swallow hard and vote for the more conservative of the two major party candidates."

Is the religious right moving 'beyond mere identity politics' and toward 'political compromise'?

Writing in the November 27 edition of the Los Angeles Times, Dan Gilgoff, editor of Beliefnet's God-o-meter and the author of "The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War," suggested that Robertson's endorsement and the subsequent dustup is "a sure sign that many evangelical leaders have moved beyond mere identity politics and toward an overdue openness to compromise in a political system that's built on it."

One of the most troubling tendencies of the Christian right has been its habit of translating the black-and-white literalism of its theology to the political realm. Under this model, Democrats and moderate Republicans are God's sworn enemies and must be opposed at every turn. Rather than compromise, the Christian right has attempted to stage a conservative Republican "takeover" of Washington, with considerable electoral success during the Bush years but with poisonous consequences for politics and policy.

The willingness of a powerful figure such as Robertson to work with a former enemy such as Giuliani, by contrast, is evidence of the Christian right's ideological demilitarization. Add it to other recent evangelical partnerships -- with feminists, for instance, on the issue of sex trafficking, and environmentalists on the issue of global warming -- and a trend emerges.

Where Gilgoff sees maturity, Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelicals and Civic Life Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, sees betrayal. Cromartie characterized the Robertson endorsement as being "past Mr. Robertson being the pragmatic politician."

Cromartie told NewsMax: "He is not taken seriously. For the religious conservative movement, it has moved on. Mr. Robertson is important only as a curiosity to the mainstream media. I don't know anybody in the evangelical [movement] who is sitting around saying 'I am going to wait for what Pat does.'"

In October, Mike Huckabee told the crowd at the Value Voters Summit in Washington that "... it's important that people sing from their hearts and don't merely lip-sync the lyrics to our songs," referring to the presidential contenders. "I think it's important that the language of Zion is a mother tongue and not a recently acquired second language."

Some pundits are speculating that a Giuliani/Huckabee combo could be the dream GOP ticket and an instant rift healer.

For that to happen, however, Huckabee would have to go back on what he has been touting as one of his major virtues -- loyalty to principles rather than politics. Huckabee has often maintained that Christian right leaders "are more intoxicated with power than principle."

Undoubtedly, a Giuliani/Huckabee embrace in Minneapolis next summer would make quite a sight.

There have always been splits and differences within Republican Party ranks, a longtime GOP operative recently told me. The current split "caused by the presidential race is best defined by who people are against rather than who they are for. Ultimately, it will not hurt the values voter movement. They will lead against the Democratic nominee no matter who the Republican candidate is. But a Republican candidate who is not trusted by the grassroots will not win against a solid Democrat ticket, no matter what Christian movement leaders say or do."