"The biggest casualty of the Tea Party takeover of the GOP is not the Republican brand but the evangelical Billy Graham style brand. According to polls, over 60 percent-plus of Tea Party members identify as evangelicals. The Tea Party is mostly the Franklin Graham/Sarah Palin born-again evangelical anti-abortion, anti-gay coalition renamed, with a handful of Ayn Rand libertarians thrown in. And in the public opinion polls most Americans blame the Republicans for the needless shutdown and the Tea Party for radicalizing the GOP. This is going to prove a toxic mix for the evangelical movement. There’s a bigger story here and one with far greater long term implications: the destruction of the Christian brand name and most specifically, the evangelical brand. For years the evangelical brand has worn the soul-winning (no pun) smile of Billy Graham. Countless scandals about finance, sexuality, hypocrisy and the rest that overtook lesser lights than Graham haven’t derailed the brand. But recently other commentators besides me have been writing about the slow decline in the evangelical’s ability to bring the next generation with them into both the conservative fold and the political embrace of the GOP. Even their theology is wavering, a fact loudly lamented by conservative evangelicals. Issues like poverty relief, human trafficking and the environment have begun to supplant abortion and stopping gay marriage as what the younger evangelical set care about. The ugly meanness of the religious right has done its negative PR work: the younger evangelicals have been turned off by their parent’s generation of religious right activity. The result is things like the emergent church movement, new theologies discounting the existence of a literal hell, while embracing the truth of evolution, and a generational divide over gay marriage."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2013/10/tea-party-kills-billy-graham-a-true-headline-you-wont-be-reading/