Planting Liberally

A few weeks ago, in response to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece claiming that a "baby gap" would ruing liberal's chances in elections of the future, I wrote:

For the liberal movement to grow, it's necessary to either reverse the baby gap; make liberalism a more readily inherited ideology than conservatism; make the parenting process itself a liberalizing life change; or some combination of these three changes.

An insighful diary at Street Prophets points to a lot of worry in the evangelical community that fewer and fewer young adults will stay in the church into adulthood. The diarist, Sarea, hints at some reasons why that might be a problem, or why those people might not abandon religion forever, just evangelical Christianity. At any rate, if the trend holds out, it would be an interesting validation of what I've suggested here: conservatism is not inheritable the way liberalism is. There is an obvious caveat that evangelicals are not all conservatives. On the other hand, they are predominantly center-right politically, and the steep drop in numbers (down from the current total of 35% of the adult population, to 4% of the future adult population) suggests that the loss in numbers cannot possibly come all from the leftist part of the evangelical community.