In case you missed it, there was a full-on blogswarm this week, centering around the growing rift between the Religious Left and the Religious Industrial Complex.   The blogswarm was touched off by Sarah Posner's article in Religion DispatchesDispatches from the Religious Left.  PastorDan has a good, linky reflection on the blogswarm at Street Prophets; check it out if you want the gory details.

The main line of argument, which we've seen before, is something like this: Religious Left-ists argue that reproductive choice and gay rights are not compromise-able issues, they are fundamentally matters of conscience.  Democrats should not seek to "split the difference" with moderate religious voters over these issues, because people's fundamental rights are not something we should haggle over.  The Religious Industrial Complex, represented this week by Faith in Public Life, counsels Democrats to do exactly that, pleading that it is possible to win elections by cajoling swing voters on these sorts of issues.

The Religious-Industrial Complex (Digby's term, but popularized and used frequently by PastorDan) has been making these sorts of arguments for a long time, and I think they are largely dubious.  For one thing, I'm not convinced that religious moderates can be convinced by hair-splitting on abortion and gay rights; any kind of faith-based voting in this year's election was clearly overwhelmed by economic-meltdown-based voting, and there were other issues confounding the 2006 election results, too.  For another thing, I'm not sure we would want to do that even if we could.  Atheists and non-Christians, two groups that are significantly more progressive than religious moderates, are also growing quickly in size.  Because of that, appealing too heavily to religious moderates by giving up core convictions on reproductive choice and gay rights could be a double-whammy: not only would that roll back progress on important issues, it might be electorally disastrous.

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