John Schmalzbauer’s essay on today’s Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame provides useful context for the Dobson-Obama kerfuffle. I do think it’s possible to get carried away by all the talk of diversity within the evangelical world. All such groupings–mainline Protestants and Jews, for example–embrace lots of differences. But often these appear a lot bigger from the inside than from without.
Auto-correction: I seem to have been laboring under the misapprehension that it was Obama’s 2007 speech to the U.C.C. that Dobson criticized, whereas in fact it was his 2006 speech at the Call to Renewal.