EDGE Boston

It was Pat Buchanan who introduced the concept of a "culture war" in America at the 1992 GOP convention that nominated George Bush (the father, not the son).

"There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," he said. "It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side... [W]e must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country."

Buchanan was certainly channeling the zeitgeist. The Moral Majority had formed a decade before, and suddenly Evangelical Christians, who had studiously avoided the political limelight since Prohibition, were front and center in the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

Thereby began the long and properous reign of the religious right. The term "religious right" itself reflects the new reality; in the past, the Bible Best was, if anything, politically radical. William Jennigs Bryan, probably the most fervent Evangelical Christian ever to make a serious run for the White House, was a prairie populist. (It was only later he descended into the caricature of the anti-Darwin figure in "Inherit the Wind.")

Aside from abortion, the flash point for these cultural warriors was always gay rights--gay wrongs, in their eyes. Not equal rights, but special rights: that was their mantra. Groups like Focus on the Family, the American Family Association and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality proliferated like jack rabbits in the hills of Colorado Springs.

Flash forward to 2009. A very gay-friendly White House, gay marriage in four states, the inevitable progression toward openly serving in the military, several openly gay mayors of major cities (with one on track to be governor, in Rhode Island), several gay congressmembers, gay ambassadors, and gay justices on states’ highest benches. Even several Republicans, such as the daughter of presidential candidate John McCain, now openly advocate for gay marriage.

In business and the arts, gay men and lesbians have become prominent, from multi-billionaire David Geffen, perhaps the most powerful man in Hollywood, to philanthropists like Tim Gill, Fred Hochberg and James Hormel. Rather than being a detriment, entertainers like Ellen DeGeneris, Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Lane are finding that it only adds to their allure.

So where does this leave the cultural warriors? Depressed and defeated, according to a report in the British newspaper Telegraph. In an article headlined "US Religious Right Concedes Defeat," Alex Spillius reports that "leading evangelicals have admitted that their association with George W. Bush has not only hurt the cause of social conservatives but contributed to the failure of the key objectives of their 30-year struggle."

The key event may have been the retirement speech to his followers by James Dobson, the head of the once-influential Focus on the Family. "The battle is still to be waged," he said. "We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles."

The Christian Right was also badly damaged by wild assertions of insider knowledge of God’s righteous path. Rev John Hagee was roundly ridiculed for asserting that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on New Orleans for Southern Decadence. But the man who claims to have the red phone directly to the deity is Pat Robertson.

Once the most powerful man on the religious right, Robertson began a swift descent in the days after Sept. 11, when he and Jerry Falwell, the other major honcho in the movement, pontificated that the fall of the World Trade Center was the result of abortion, feminists and, of course, the gays. Robertson had previously prayed that Hurricane Gloria wouldn’t strike the Hampton Bays area, where he lives and works, and instead strike New York City. (It didn’t.)

In an article last month in the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spence, who lives in a religious community in Kentucky, predicted, as per the headline, "the coming evangelical collapse."

"We are on the verge--within 10 years--of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity," Spencer warned. "Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants."

He’s also very clear that evangelicals have only themselves to blame: "Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society."

The Washington Post weighed in with another apocalyptic headline that expressed the two main factions in this war of attrition: "Faith groups losing fights against gays."

"Faith organizations and individuals who view homosexuality as sinful and refuse to provide services to gay people are losing a growing number of legal battles," Jacqueline Salmon writes. "The lawsuits have resulted from states and communities that have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those laws have created a clash between the right to be free from discrimination and the right to freedom of religion, religious groups said, with faith losing."

An op-ed in the McClatchy Newspaper group opined that the Iowa decision to allow gay marriages in the Hawkeye State marked an important--and probably decisive--turn in the culture wars. Writer Barbara Shelly called the court’s decision "corner turned in the quest of gay and lesbian couples to achieve equal status under the law."

Although the struggle is not over, "the tide of public opinion is pulling toward acceptance," with a Newsweek poll showing for the first time a majority of Americans--63 percent-- favoring full marriage equality, either through marriage or civil unions. If one considers that only a few years ago, Vermont’s becoming the first state to offer civil unions set off a firestorm of protest around the country shows how far we’ve come in such a short time.

"Now that same-sex marriages are becoming reality, the grounds on which to oppose them are even shakier," Shelly writes. "Gay and lesbian partners are good neighbors. They raise happy, well-adjusted children. They lead parents’ committees in schools, and coach soccer teams. It is difficult to oppose a way of life that looks a lot like one’s own."