THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

That is a question the people, voters and lunatics of the Alabama First Congressional District will get to answer in their primary election on Tuesday.

How does one get rid of Obamacare? How badly does a broken immigration policy hurt the district? What is the best way to roll back federal spending and intrusion into state issues? As for President Obama, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria received more kind words.

But while the Republicans running to represent Alabama’s First Congressional District are in agreement on the core message, their styles vary, in some ways jarringly. And the outcome of Tuesday’s primary, though likely to be a function of turnout here, may provide some hints on how much further the Republican shift to the right might go.

There was a time when this primary would be automatic. The district, which surrounds Mobile Bay, was one of several in Alabama to vote Republican in 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran for president and Alabama was still a solidly Democratic state. For the nearly five decades since, it was represented by just three Republican congressmen, the first two publicly designating their successors and all three inclined to effective deal-making rather than fiery rhetoric.

“The thing that makes a congressman effective in the South is constituent services,” said Sonny Callahan, who represented the district in Congress from 1985 to 2003.

Such a candidate in the past may have been Bradley Byrne, 58, a former state senator and the current front-runner, or perhaps Chad A. Fincher, 39, a two-term state legislator from Mobile’s conservative western suburbs. But with no heir apparent for the first time in 50 years, the full spectrum of conservatism is on display: from Mr. Byrne, who speaks sunnily of the country’s ability to overcome any of its current challenges, to Dean Young, a real estate developer and Tea Party favorite who describes the stakes of the election in far less optimistic terms.

“We are witnessing the end of a Western Christian empire,” Mr. Young, 49, said at the forum.

So it's "the end of a Western Christian empire", is it? Perhaps if Mr. Young gets elected and is allowed to eat away at the foundations of civilization in this country.