As Hanna Rosin notes, social science statistics show that people who describe themselves as "evangelicals" don't differ from other Americans in rates of divorce, teenage sex, and abortion.

Does this mean that wherever we see the word "evangelical", we can now substitute "self-righteous hypocrite"?

Perhaps there are two other reasons why evangelicals have had limited success in practical politics:

1. They always seem to be smugly disparaging the "values" of everyone else;

2. One can't help but suspect what the statistics demonstrate - evangelicals don't abide by the morality they preach to others.