As of today, Spiritual Politics has joined up with a larger journalistic venture. Not to worry: I'll still be your friendly shipmaster, pursuing the same prey as before. And SP will continue to wear the Greenberg Center/Trinity College logo. But after four years as a privateer, we'll be sailing under the flag of the Religion News Service, which has been providing the country with even-handed syndicated coverage of religion for nearly four score years.

Last May, RNS left the for-profit world, combining forces with the Religion Newswriters Service under the auspices of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. And with the help of a nice grant from Lilly Endowment, Inc., it has undertaken to transform itself from an old-time wire service into a modern webzine, complete with a small array of blogs. SP's new URL is http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/mark-silk.

After yesterday's soft launch, SP is going along for the shakedown cruise, which is due to last a few weeks. Whereupon RNS will announce the new site with fanfare and huzzahs. In the meantime, suggestions and complaints are welcome...and may even be acted upon. Just send me an email at mark.silk@trincoll.edu. Welcome aboard...new posts up.

What happened in South Carolina is really pretty simple. The Mormon Gap killed Mitt Romney. Defined as the percentage-point difference between the evangelical and the non-evangelical vote for a given Mormon candidate in a Republican primary, it turned out to be 16 points; i.e. Romney won 38 percent of non-evangelicals but only 22 percent of evangelicals. By contrast, Newt Gingrich won 44 percent of evangelicals, as opposed to only 33 percent of non-evangelicals.

In other words, had evangelicals voted like non-evangelicals, Romney would have won the primary, 38 percent to 33 percent. But since fully 65 percent of GOP primary voters counted themselves as evangelical, he lost, 28 percent to 40 percent. And lest anyone think that Gingrich, the Catholic convert, can't be the Huckabee of 2012, be it noted that Newt actually did a point better among evangelicals in the Palmetto State than Mike did in 2008. 

Update: This blog has joined forces with the Religion News Service and is now sailing under their banner at http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/mark-silk. What happened in SC seems to be happening in Florida.

We know about the political Gender Gap: the tendency of women vote Democratic and men to vote Republican. And we know about the God Gap: the tendency of the more religious to vote Republican and the less religious to vote Democratic. To these two (discussed here) we should start thinking about a third gap, more limited in scope but nevertheless of real potential significance. Call it the Mormon Gap: the tendency of evangelicals to vote disproportionately against Mormon candidates in Republican primaries.

The Mormon Gap may be defined as the percentage-point difference between the evangelical and the non-evangelical vote for a given Mormon candidate. Despite reports from the field alleging that Mitt Romney's Mormonism is less of a factor this primary season than it was in 2008, the Mormon gap has thus far not shrunk. To the contrary.

As I've noted before, Romney did worse with evangelicals in this year's Iowa Caucuses than he did four years ago. Then the Mormon Gap (Evangelicals/Non-Evangelicals) was 14 points (19/33); this year it was 24 points (14/38). In New Hampshire, the gap was seven points in 2008 (27/34) and nine points this year (31/40). In South Carolina, the gap was 8 points in 2008 (11/19); according to the latest PPP poll, it's now running at 18 points (21/39).

Now you might think that what we're looking at is not a Mormon Gap but a Romney Gap. But there's a good piece of evidence that suggests that this is not just about Romney. In this year's New Hampshire primary there was a second Mormon candidate who did well enough for a Mormon Gap to be assessed. And in John Huntsman's case the gap was 10 points (9/19).

Of course, given contests with different proportions of evangelical voters and multiple candidates finishing with varying vote totals, the significance of the Mormon Gap changes from state to state. In Iowa and South Carolina, where evangelicals make up some 60 percent of the Republican electorate, it's very significant. In New Hampshire, where they are less than a quarter, not so much: Romney's 9-point gap reduced his total vote by just three percentage points.

How much does the Mormon Gap matter? After the 2008 election cycle, John Green and I ran the numbers and concluded that Mitt Romney lost the nomination because evangelicals didn't vote for him. If he loses the nomination this time around, it will be for the same reason.

...and a time to cease from winning. Your glum proprietor looks on as Trinity's NCAA record 252-game winning streak comes to an end. I'm proud to serve as academic adviser to a terrific bunch of kids. To every thing there is a season.

So in South Carolina yesterday a man who, well, might be Muslim, asks Newt Gingrich whether he could support a Muslim-American for president, given that we recently had a woman in Hillary Clinton and a Jewish-American in Joe Lieberman running for president. And without missing a beat, Newt responds:

I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up sharia. I am totally opposed to sharia law being accepted by any court in the United States. In fact, I favor a federal law that preempts it, and says sharia law will not be used in any court in the United States. And this is a very fundamental question...

We have a friend in Arizona who serves in the U.S. Navy, who's a medical doctor, who's Muslim, but who's a totally modern person trying to find ways to bring Islam into modernity...

It depends entirely on the person. If they are a modern person integrated into the modern world and prepared to recognize all religions that's one thing. On the other hand, if they are the Saudis who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow either a Jew or Christian to worship in Saudi Arabia, that's something different...

But within that framework, a truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat. On the other hand, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat.

Now let's try substituting "halakha" for "sharia." Halakha is the large body of Jewish law by which rabbinical authorities have for a couple of millennia sought to regulate the religious and civic behavior of the Jewish people. Some of it is more authoritative, some less, and new rulings get issued by different rabbinic powers that be. If he wants to find Saudi-like examples of it, Gingrich should check out Israel's haredim, who are hard at work these days trying to undermine the equal status of women, to say nothing of issuing fatwas against Jews working with and selling real estate to non-Jews. Not very modern.

On the other hand, there's the aforementioned Joe Lieberman, a more or  less modern individual who observes the Sabbath, keeps kosher, and generally, as Newt would say, belongs to some kind of belief in halakha. I don't know whether Newt would ever have supported Lieberman's presidential aspirations, but I'm inclined to think that he wouldn't consider them a mortal threat to the republic.

Support for presidential candidates aside, Gingrich's sharia preemption law would not only be unconstitutional (as a federal judge in Oklahoma recently made abundantly clear), it represents precisely the kind of war on religion that he (along with Rick Santorum and Rick Perry) have been heatedly charging the Obama Administration with conducting. What is the ministerial exception to employment law but judicial recognition of a particular faith's right to use its own rules to determine who's in charge?

If the Free Exercise clause means anything, it means the right of Americans not to be a modern person integrated into the modern world, whatever that means. Gingrich's personal religious test for presidential office is about as un-American as it gets.

To evangelicals, that is. Here's how R. Philip Roberts, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, explained it to Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times:

I don't have any concerns about Mitt Romney using his position as either a candidate or as president of the United States to push Mormonism. The concern among evangelicals is that the Mormon Church will use his position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people.

That would be kind of like Focus on the Family using Tim Tebow's position as the anointed quarterback of the Denver Broncos to run its cute John 3:16 commercial during Saturday's Broncos-Patriots blowout.

Personally, I'd be surprised if the LDS Church decided to feature President Romney (much less Candidate Romney) in one of its "I'm a Mormon" ads. But Roberts' admission does tell us something about why evangelical leaders really like the idea of having one of their own in the White House: It's as much about the religious as the political agenda.

That's the word from the conclave in Texas. Will these guys have enough swot to move South Carolina evangelicals away from Gingrich? "Easy to command" was in the famous WaPo crack about the evangelical rank-and-file 20 years ago. As the next day's correction declared, there was "no factual basis" for saying so then. Maybe there will be now. Or maybe, the pooh-bahs will mainly succeed in dividing the evangelical sea sufficiently to let Romney cross through victorious. Update: WaPo's Dan Balz rings the changes.

Not quite, according to the latest ARG poll. But he's running only four points behind Romney, 25 percent to 29 percent. And here's the thing. According to ARG, Gingrich enjoys the support of 40 percent of the GOP evangelical vote. Now if evangelicals turn out at the rate they did in 2008--60 percent of GOP primary voters--that would equate to 24 percent of the total. I refuse to believe that Newt is winning only two or three percent of non-evangelicals. Which means that ARG may be significantly underestimating evangelical turnout.

As for Romney, his evangelical support is now at 13 per cent, just two points higher than it was in 2008, when he finished fourth (behind McCain, Huckabee, and Thompson) with 15 percent. No doubt, he's now picking up a lot of that McCain non-evangelical support. But McCain eked out a three point victory (33-30) over Huckabee with 27 percent evangelical support. (Huckabee had 43 percent.) And Romney's nowhere near 27 percent. So as I say, Gingrich may well be winning SC right now.

According to the fascinating new Pew survey of American Mormons, Mormons are a lot like evangelicals, only more so. They're more religious, more hostile to homosexuality, more opposed to sex between unmarried adults, more likely to favor smaller government, more politically conservative, and more Republican than evangelicals. (They are, at the same time, equally opposed to abortion, more accepting of divorce, and more likely to see immigration as strengthening the country.)

Of course, given what we all know about evangelicals, it comes as no surprise that 50 percent of Mormons think evangelicals are unfriendly toward them, while only18 percent think they are friendly. I just wish Pew had asked the Mormons how friendly they think Mormons are towards evangelicals.