In the New York Post today...
The Political Conversion of New York's Evangelicals
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
Published: November 14, 2004
The signs are all around. Storefront churches dot the commercial landscapes of the Bronx and Queens. Twice as many churchgoers - about 15,000 - pray weekly at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, compared with five years ago. Some 200,000 New Yorkers tune in daily to Radio Vision Cristiana, an AM radio station. And last March, thousands of evangelicals gathered on the steps of the State Supreme Court in the Bronx to protest the idea of same-sex marririage.
The rest of the story in my diary.
Evangelism is flourishing not just in the red states of the nation's heartland, but in the urban, liberal stronghold of New York City, where thousands of evangelical churches are anchored in working-class neighborhoods. Whether it will evolve into a local political force, as it has nationally, remains an open question. But a range of interviews with pastors, congregants and religious experts suggests that a new debate - and perhaps a political conversion - is taking place in parts of the city's minority neighborhoods, swaths that Democrats have long claimed as their own.
It is a conversion that prompted Jeanmarie Salazar, a Puerto Rican mother of four in the Bronx, to vote for President Bush even though his economic policies troubled her. And a conversion that caused Harold Thompson, an African-American from Flatbush who lived through the civil rights movement, to part with a lifetime of voting Democratic, citing the "immorality that is destroying our country."
Both Ms. Salazar and Mr. Thompson belong to evangelical churches whose leaders have spread a single but potent message: Faith trumps everything else, even traditional party alignments.
"They're beginning to think about the social transformation of New York City," said Tony Carnes, a sociologist of religion at Columbia University.
Precisely determining the number of people who consider themselves members of evangelical churches or movements is difficult. Mr. Carnes said that he conducted a census of the city's evangelical churches and estimated that 1.5 million New Yorkers attend them. A separate study, conducted in 2000 by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, put the number of evangelical New Yorkers closer to 1 million, said Vivian Klaff, a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware who analyzed the study's data.
If a fully accurate count of evangelicals in the city is difficult to achieve, it is even harder, at the moment, to define the voting patterns of evangelicals. But the number of Protestant New Yorkers who cast ballots for a Republican president more than doubled in the last four years, to nearly a quarter of those surveyed at polling sites by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. And a recent study by Mr. Carnes suggested that a majority of evangelical church leaders in the city were breaking with tradition and voting Republican: of 1,006 ordained ministers surveyed last year, Mr. Carnes found, 55 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Bush.
About 30 percent of the ministers were black and 30 percent Hispanic, reflecting the demographic breakdown of the religious group, Mr. Carnes said.
"It's a significant development," said Randall Barnes, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College. But, he added, the Republican Party in New York City is "still a decade or two away from making significant inroads into that community."
Any measuring of the political clout of evangelicals in the city, now or in the future, is complicated by the fact that a sizable portion of them are from other countries, and some are not eligible to vote, said Mr. Carnes, who conducted his study with a team of pollsters at the International Research Institute on Values Changes, an independent research group in New York City. The study was financed by the Christian Cultural Center, a charismatic evangelical church.
But the results indicated a shift to the right among voting evangelicals. In a separate study he did in 1997, Mr. Carnes said, only 22 percent of the city's evangelical church leaders surveyed identified themselves as "politically conservative."
End of article..
They are everywhere and trying to take over the country!!!