To be re-elected, Bush needs two different groups to vote for him: those who support him on general political issues and those who support him when it comes to cultural/religious issues. Sometimes those two groups overlap, but more and more they are separating. Bush can't refrain from appealing to his core base of conservative evangelicals on cultural/religious issues, but doing that too much will drive away others who might have voted for him in different circumstances.

Sidney Blumenthal writes for The Guardian:

Bush's instigation of religious wars in America, while it mobilizes the evangelical Protestant faithful, is also unexpectedly thwarting him. The born-again Bush, who reconstructed his presidential self-image after 9/11 as a messianic leader, assumed that the agendas of the neocons and the theocons were one and the same. However, Bush outsourced his foreign policy on the Middle East and Israel to the neocons in part for an electoral purpose, capturing the Jewish vote, which will not be fulfilled because of his anxious devotion to the theocons.

The neocons and the theocons were bound together in reaction against the 1960s for different reasons: the neocons on foreign policy, the theocons by their continuing fundamentalist revolt against modernity going back to the early 20th century. Under Ronald Reagan, this coalition was held together in the crusade against godless communism.

This is, as Blumenthal alludes to, an old issue: moderate northern conservatives don't always see eye-to-eye with southern evangelicals. The Republican Party has come more and more to rely upon southern evangelicals, however, and that means marginalzing moderate northerners. Who will end up controlling the Republican Party and what will that mean for their long-term electoral chances?

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Christian Extremism
• Christian Nationalism
• Religious Intolerance & Bigotry
• Evangelicalism