Planting Liberally

Over at Street Prophets, Pastor Dan today posts an interesting idea: monitor evangelical sermon podcasts for Huckabee endorsements. While Pastor Dan suggests only monitoring the likely suspects, I think it'd be far more efficient to use audio or textual search to find sermons that mention "Huckabee" or one of the other candidates, and just listen to those. Presumably, some good netroots crowdsourcing can be brought to bear on this project. While I think this would be a really interesting project to pull off, I'm not entirely sure it would be effective in separating Huckabee from the evangelical network. After all, pastoral endorsements are hardly the only way the message gets out about a candidate within a church network. Moreover, most pastors are not dumb enough to flagrantly violate the rules governing tax-exempt status, and many are too concerned with evangelism to participate in politics besides. In fact, you could make a case that the churches most likely to be savvy enough to podcast and otherwise put their sermons online are the least likely to violate anti-trust rules. Anyway, it's a creative idea, and I think it deserves some credit. Three cheers!