Democrats made quite a show of being interested in faith and religious voters during the 2008 election. Now religious activists are shocked, shocked, to find out they apparently didn’t mean it:

“It’s a mystery to everyone what happened to Democratic faith outreach in the last year,” said Rebecca Sager, a Loyola Marymount University professor who writes and teaches about the religious progressive movement. “There is sort of this, ‘We worked so hard and made so much progress, and 2008 seemed like this great year, and then what happened?'”

Uh, Obama got elected and Democrats got control of the House. Not everyone was duped; some activists and certainly Republicans saw the Democrats’ outreach as “little more than window dressing.”

Moreover, Obama has been indifferent if not hostile to the promotion of religious freedom. Those taken in by Obama’s appeal to religious voters can join the fiscal conservatives and pro-Israel advocates who were similarly snowed.