Hopefully, JCHFleetguy will stop by to fill us in on some of the inside baseball connected to this statement. As for myself, I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it seems like a step in the right direction. Religious movements need to differentiate themselves from political apparatuses in order to fulfill their ministries. That's simple.

This is not the same Evangelical Manifesto but an earlier one, but I think it gives a sense of what's likely to come out of the one to be released on Wednesday:

The Board of Directors and the vast leadership network of NAE are committed to the five calls for action listed below and urge evangelicals from all quarters to join in a commitment to these:

Call for Prayer
Call for Repentance & Reform
Call for Unity & Cooperation
Call for Evangelism
Call for Cultural Impact

Get back to the core mission of the movement, in other words. They've wrapped that in some polemic ("useful idiots") to draw some attention, but otherwise, it's nothing evangelicals haven't said before. Jeff Sharlet tells me via e-mail:

The advance word I've heard on this in evangelical circles is that even some "new evangelicals" recognize this as a retread. This kind of declaration is old news in the evangelical word, as old as the official coinage of "evangelical" as the label preferred to "fundamentalist," back at the 1942 creation of the National Association of Evangelicals. More recently, we saw this narrative play out with the National Association of Evangelicals "For the Health of the Nation," which suckered progressives eager to believe not once but twice.

More recently still, David Kuo, the former Special Assistant to Bush for faith-based initiatives who wrote the legislation that created FBI as an aide to Ashcroft in the 90s and then, by his own admission, helped turn it into a Republican vote-getting machine under Bush, pulled the same trick with his otherwise admirable tell-all of his Bush years, "Tempting Faith." At the end, Kuo proposes a temporary moratorium on evangelical political activity while evangelicals reflect on how they went wrong and how they allowed right wing politics from the real work of spreading the gospel. Liberals crowed over Kuo, ignoring what he told me in an interview he'd meant as obvious: A) the break was just just that, a break, temporary; B) the goal was not less evangelical influence over society, but more.

I have no problem with that, and I don't believe Jeff would either. Evangelical political operatives like Kuo have a right to advocate for their movement, same as anybody else. But let's not kid ourselves, they are advocating.

This manifesto seems mighty convenient to me. Just as soon as things start to tilt away from conservatives in the public realm, we get a statement calling for everybody to pull together and and work for the good of the kingdom instead of those nasty partisan politics. I respect Richard Mouw enough to suspend judgment on that score, but I gotta tell you, it seems pretty suspicious to me.

We shall see what comes of it on Wednesday. I have a feeling it's going to be pretty nearly dead on arrival though:

Richard Land, head of the public policy arm for the Southern Baptist Convention, said through a spokeswoman that he has not seen the document and was not asked to sign it.

James Dobson, the influential founder of Focus on the Family, a Christian group in Colorado Springs, Colo., did not sign the document, said Gary Schneeberger, a Dobson spokesman. Schneeberger would not say whether Dobson had read the manifesto or had been asked to sign on.

Phil Burress, an Ohio activist who networks with national evangelical leaders, said that if high-profile evangelical leaders such as Dobson and Land don't support the document, "it's like throwing a pebble in the ocean" and will carry no weight.

Go google "An Evangelical Manifesto" and see what kind of reaction it's getting. A pebble in the ocean indeed.