The WaPo’s E.J. Dionne Jr. makes the case today that in 2008, with all of the challenges we face, no one really wants to hear the right whine about God, guns, and gays anymore.

We are at the beginning of a new era in which large, secular problems related to war and peace, economics and the United States’ standing in the world will displace culture and religion as the electorate’s central concerns. Divisions on “values” questions will not disappear, but they will be far less important to voters and campaigns.

Just four years ago, we were arguing over whether Bush was reelected primarily because of his strong support from voters who told the exit pollsters that “moral values” had guided their decisions. We parsed the political preferences of those who attend religious services frequently and those who never go — and found the former group rather staunchly Republican, the latter strongly Democratic. It was 1928 all over again. Culture and religion ruled.

In truth, Bush’s victory rested both on 9/11 and on enthusiasm from religious voters. But what’s most important is that 2004, like 1928, is destined to be the last in a long line of contests in which culture and religion proved central to the outcome.

Dionne’s case is pretty persuasive. Indeed, the evidence to bolster his case is already apparent — while Dems are minimizing and seeking to heal cultural and religious rifts, John McCain was able to secure the Republican nomination despite opposition from the party’s culture-warrior base. The latter is a modern first.

Indeed, while my distaste for McCain is fairly intense, I feel relatively confident that he probably won’t emphasize gay-bashing and gun-grabbing throughout the fall.

But there’s still one whopping caveat to all of this. The ‘08 cycle will still be plenty divisive — it’s just more likely to be divisive on different issues.

In other words, the right will have less of an incentive to bash Democrats as gay-loving, prayer-banning ACLU members, and more of an incentive to bash Democrats as terrorist-coddling, torture-banning, immigrant-loving tax raisers.

It’s not so much that the culture war is over, but rather, it’s picking up new issues. The old ones became passé, and for lack of a better word, boring. The right still hopes to divide Americans, but with demagoguery for a new generation. Falwell is dead, Robertson is laughed at, and Dobson is wondering why people aren’t jumping to return his phone calls anymore. The activists that made these religious right leaders wealthy and powerful are still around, and they’re still asking the same old questions, but now they have kids who want to know why climate change and poverty aren’t considered moral questions, too.

And mainstream Americans consider the recession, Iraq, and healthcare and energy costs, and suddenly find it a lot more difficult to get worked up over civil unions and Ten Commandments displays.

What’s more, I’d go so far as to say the religious activists themselves are exhausted. They worked tirelessly in 2004 to get exactly what they wanted — a far-right president working with a far-right Congress. In terms of legislative accomplishments, what big-ticket items got crossed off their to-do list? Not a whole lot. These folks will certainly keep voting, and will definitely keeping backing Republicans, but I think even they’ve learned that their legislative dreams aren’t going to come to fruition.

Dionne concluded:

The era of the religious right is over. Even absent the rise of urgent new problems, Americans had already reached a point of exhaustion with a religious style of politics that was dogmatic, partisan and ideological.

That style reflected a spirit far too certain of itself and far too insistent on the moral depravity of its political adversaries. It had the perverse effect of narrowing the range of issues on which religious traditions would speak out and thinning our moral discourse. Precisely because I believe in a strong public role for faith, I would insist that it is a great sellout of those traditions to assert that religion has much to say about abortion and same-sex marriage but little to teach us about war and peace, social justice and the environment.

With the United States turning its attention again to very large, post-9/11 issues — as our forebears did during the Depression, World War II and the Cold War — we will certainly be asking for God’s blessing and help. But the questions that will most engage us will be about survival and prosperity, not religion and culture.

If Dionne is right, and I think he is, the country will be better for it.