Last week, we blogged on the Times essay by David  Kirkpatrick titled “The Evangelical Crackup,” about the splintering of the Christian right.  One Evangelical says this isn’t the case, though. Evangelicals aren’t cracking up, because we never were a bloc in the first place.

David Sessions writes:

The evangelical right is actually doing no such thing. These trends are largely invented, indicative of a media knack for chronicling evangelical impact in absurdly narrow cycles. Contrary to [one writer's] assertion in 2000, the Christian Coalition’s financial troubles and Gary Bauer’s withdrawal from the presidential race didn’t signal a decline of the religious right. Karl Rove may have used evangelicals to defeat John Kerry in 2004, but the media’s inflation of that victory to mythical proportions is a wild overstatement of the facts. And this year, Kirkpatrick overshoots his case by suggesting that all the grumbling over presidential candidates prophesies Christianity’s political apocalypse.

Instead, evangelicals, a notoriously diverse and fastidious demographic, are doing what they always do: bickering their way to a compromise over a candidate.

The Times especially does seem to like the idea of a splintering Evangelical demographic – kind of a The-Boogeyman-is-Human! reporting.