Popular, from the musical Wicked, with Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenowith…

Every once in a while, I read something so gobsmackingly discordant that it jars my perception of reality.  This isn’t one of those times.  Via NYObserver:

…Not only is the political-evangelical alliance “built primarily on personal relationships” and “connections formed outside of Washington,” but the networks that now bind various professional elites constitute nothing less than a new freestanding grid of social power: Christian philanthropic boards and corporate-sponsored “parachurch” groups promote a new form of elite cohesion, “not by social class or shared backgrounds,” but “by faith.”

Mr. Lindsay is clearly correct in one sense: The leaders he’s talked to are beset with the self-consciousness and status anxiety of an elite still familiarizing itself with the confident exercise of power. The growing ambit of evangelical power—spanning the boardrooms of corporate behemoths like Johnson and Johnson and Wal-Mart up through the top echelons of the Bush White House—has fueled a deepening schism, he notes, between the “cosmopolitan” temperament of movement leaders and the “populist” convictions of the evangelical rank-and-file. The jet-setting, boardroom-friendly leadership seems pointedly uneasy with the “evangelical kitsch” that down-home believers embrace, such as Christian pop or the pulpy Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Movement leaders feel more at home in parachurch groupings, where power speaks to power—and oddly, in the nation’s great suburban megachurches, which mix populist presentation styles with a steady diet of business-friendly homilies. One businessman tells Mr. Lindsay admiringly that his megachurch pastor “could have been CEO of a Fortune 10 company.”

The cosmopolitan strain of elite evangelical life is most evident in Hollywood and other culture industries, where evangelical leaders have actively urged adopting the interest-group politics of their avowed lifestyle enemies in the gay and lesbian community. As one ministry executive explained, “If we could get an Ellen DeGeneres figure who is likable and popular to ‘come out’ as an evangelical, many more people would have positive impressions of the movement as a whole.” Evangelical screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi reports being pleasantly surprised to hear from a staffer of the showbiz TV newsmag program Inside Edition that “Christian is the new gay.”…

American elites neither accumulate nor exercise power in a vacuum: Their victories come at someone else’s expense—and so long as evangelical leaders manage to portray those rollbacks as mere collateral damage in a righteous struggle against dread secular liberal humanism, then they’ve achieved a confident show of strength in the arena of social myth, where power matters most.

I’ve read the Bible a number of times, and I just don’t remember the call to clique and amass personal wealth and power to the exclusion of those less fortunate alongside the Golden Rule.  

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