Good Article on How Renegade Blogger Power-Flexing May Diffuse Southern Baptist Influence

Bloggers have become the new Baptist bogeymen. For non-Baptists, their ascendance may well mean that the voice of the Southern Baptist Convention, a potent political force for decades, will become more diffuse, less able to coordinate its attacks on secular culture, and less powerful in national politics.

- - Michael Erard, Texas Observer, July 13, 2007

If you read no other piece on bloggers or Southern Baptists this week, click on the link above and read the Texas Observer's latest cover story. Bloggers and the SBC are merely the tip of the iceberg of what seems to be a deeper shift in American power politics, hopefully leading to weaker partisan arm-twisting by the conservative evangelicals.

Erard interviews Nashville-based Richard Land, Head "Just War" Cheerleader for the Bush Administration's Iraq Junket, who utters the usual irrelevant and disparaging mantras about bloggers:

I never read the blogs ... I have staff people who monitor them, and if they think there’s something I really need to read, I read it, but I’m too busy. I have a job to do, and I’m way too busy. I can’t read as fast as they blog. I have a full-time job.

So, while his job may not allow monitoring blogs, he gives a staff full-time jobs to monitor them.