With Democrats in charge of Congress and the White House, the battery of social issues identified with the culture wars — such as abortion, gay rights and displays of faith in the public sphere — have all been trending toward secular-liberal positions. And a recent spate of scandals involving high-profile Christian politicians clustered around the C Street headquarters of the secretive Capitol Hill religious fraternity known as the Family have summoned familiar charges of hypocrisy against the evangelical right.

Still, evangelicals remain a potent political force — and as the power equation in Washington has shifted, evangelical activism has undergone a less conspicuous transformation, one that emphasizes human rights abroad. Social conservatives certainly are not forsaking the old domestic culture warfare, experts say, but they are organizing new initiatives in the developing world that are very much of a piece with the same faith-witness traditions that have informed the anti-abortion movement, for example.

The change has been gradual, according to students of the evangelical right. “There’s an increasing awareness of issues of justice and how those relate to religious commitments in ways that were not articulated 20 years ago,” says D. Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University and author of “Faith in the Halls of Power.” Lindsay points to a growing number of faith-based non-governmental organizations such as the International Justice Mission and the Institute for Global Engagement that have helped push religious conservatives to look abroad.

Lawmakers traditionally allied with the religious right likewise increasingly have stressed human rights issues such as the Darfur genocide, aid to the developing world, and the persecution of Christians and other religious denominations abroad.

Allied with evangelical Protestants are conservative members of other traditions, including some Roman Catholics. GOP Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, a Catholic, has been at the forefront of the transition, writing laws to combat human trafficking, fund microenterprises in the developing world and promote democracy in Eastern Europe. He boasts of having held more than 300 human rights-related hearings as a senior Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Smith says his pursuit of human rights issues — usually seen as a preserve of starry-eyed liberals — flows directly from his understanding of his faith. “There are numerous scriptures from the Old and New Testaments that are motivators for me,” he says. “Probably the strongest one of all was when our lord said, ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do also to me.’ And the least can be the person who can’t get food, it can be an unborn child and his or her mother, a disabled person, somebody in Darfur, a refugee.”

Lindsay, however, points to more-institutional sources of the recent conservative Christian migration into the human rights world. Churches and evangelical groups have mounted small-scale missionary efforts to deliver aid and development assistance to communities in need. And megapastor Rick Warren has made human rights a principal focus of his ministry, famously adopting war-torn Rwanda as a “purpose-driven nation” that can be significantly rebuilt via Western charitable aid.

Such initiatives, Lindsay says, significantly increase an individual believer’s investment in the development cause. “You’ve got people building these personal relationships, so they feel these human rights concerns much more personally than they did when they were simply contributing money but didn’t know the individual people involved,” he says.

Republican Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, who as a child of missionaries spent time in the Philippines, echoes that sentiment. “There’s a place for government programs, government relations,” he says, “but there is a place for people-to-people.”

Pitts has served on the Helsinki Commission and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China; he founded the Religious Prisoners Congressional Task Force in 1997. “Of course, I’m sensitive to the Christian believers who are being persecuted because of issues of faith,” he said, adding “I think religious freedom ought to be a fundamental right in every country.”

Calibrating Culture-War Stands

This is not to say, of course, that American evangelical conservatives are relaxing their vigilance on the domestic fronts. Pitts, for example, also chairs the House Values Action Team, a group of about 70 socially conservative lawmakers who convene with well-known advocacy groups on the religious right. (GOP Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas heads the Senate values-action group.) Even so, Congress’ higher-profile battles over reproductive rights are now being fought within the broader context of aid policy. During the recent debate over the fiscal 2010 State- Foreign Operations appropriations bill, Smith denounced Democratic leaders for blocking a vote on an amendment to reinstate the so-called Mexico City policy, which bans federal funding of non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortion services abroad, over President Obama’s order rescinding the policy in January.

Pitts has spent the better part of the past decade staking out new organizational and legislative efforts to promote his aims at home and abroad — beginning in late 1997, when he launched an informal network of religiously motivated lawmakers called the Wilberforce Group, after the evangelical British parliamentarian William Wilberforce. The group has since disbanded, but its alumni still collaborate. GOP Rep. Frank R. Wolf of Virginia recently teamed with Smith, a fellow Wilberforce veteran, to introduce legislation to clamp down on international child abduction.