Recently in Gingrich Category

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.

The latest Iowa polls show Newt Gingrich losing ground to Ron Paul--up by 10 points (27-17) over Paul according to InsiderAdvantage and by just one (22-21) according to PPP. Meanwhile, Gingrich's new political director, Des Moines political consultant Craig Bergman, has left the campaign allegedly for making anti-Mormon remarks at a GOP focus group just before he joined the Gingrich campaign.

Bergman got into trouble yesterday when the Iowa Republican website ran a story on a focus group, which had been assembled to assess the field of GOP presidential aspirants. Bergman's statement regarding Mormonism went as follows:

"There is a national pastor who is very much on the anti-Mitt Romney bandwagon," Craig Bergman said. "A lot of the evangelicals believe God would give us four more years of Obama just for the opportunity to expose the cult of Mormon...There's a thousand pastors ready to do that."

I'm a little dubious that this is why the under-equipped Gingrich campaign, which can ill afford to lose experienced Iowa political operatives, dropped Bergman like a hot potato. I'd say it had more to do with what he told the focus group about Gingrich himself:

Craig Bergman, a Tea Party activist and campaign veteran called Gingrich "the smartest unwise man in America. Because unwise means making bad choices." Bergman is leaning strongly toward backing Gingrich, but feels incidents like appearing in a global warming ad with Nancy Pelosi give some conservatives reservations about supporting him.

Oops. As for the putative offending remark, there's nothing particularly anti-Mormon about it. It's a putatively factual report from someone whose business it is to know what's happening on the religious right. Personally, I'd like to know who the "national pastor" is that's playing a big hand against Romney.

With the Gingrich Bubble frothing away and the Iowa caucuses just around the corner, TPM asks if the all-important evangelical voting bloc (like, half of all GOP caucus-goers) will move into Newt's camp.

The Des Moines Register's Jennifer Jacobs has done her interviews and thinks it's split. A mysterious group called Iowans for Christian Leaders in Government has released a letter whomping on Christian leader in government wannabe Bob Vander Plaats for allegedly supporting Gingrich. Meanwhile, Doctor Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention has written an open Dear Newt letter urging the Thrice Married One to give a big speech to persuade evangelical women that he has cured his cheatin' heart.

On the basis of 200 informal SBC focus groups, Land thinks Gingrich has an evangelical gender problem. The latest Insider Advantage Iowa poll suggests otherwise; Newt's got three Republican women supporting him for every two Republican men. Then there's the abortion issue, on which the Gingrichian record is just about as squishy as Mitt Romney's. Will evangelicals plump for the insufficiently pro-life Mormon or the insufficiently pro-life serial polygamist? Or a fresh new face from the back of the pack? It would be nice if the pollsters would put religious identity back into their polls and provide a gender cross tab. Enquiring minds want to know.

Newt Gingrich is so given to rhetorical hyperbole that you're tempted just to quote it, roll your eyes, and move on. A case in point is this remark from Saturday's Mormon-deprived Thanksgiving Family Forum in Des Moines:

The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head on and described as what it is which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.

But it's worth recognizing that this is not just random red meat tossed into an evangelical barbecue pit. It's part of a kulturkämpfliche weltanshauung that the card-carrying historian expects will see him all the way to the leadership of the Judeo-Christian World.

Asked by moderator Bob Vander Plaats for a single value to instill into the American public, Gingrich launched into a riff on the Declaration of Independence's declaration that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights":

...secular, a term that comes actually from the Latin seculare, meaning century, and it basically says, "Life is very limited, so you might as well get the most you can now." A belief in God is the precise opposite. It's a belief that we are all part of an eternity, and that eternity stretches behind us and ahead of us. And therefore we have to measure what we do within the framework of God's greater plan. A country which has been now, since 1963, relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn't be surprised at all the problems we have because we've in fact attempted to create a secular country, which I think is frankly a nightmare. So I think the first step is (this is not sectarian; it's not Protestant, Catholic, Jewish; this is a factual historic statement): Our founding document, which is the base of our government, says, "We are endowed by our Creator..." and therefore we have responsibilities as citizens to that Creator, and if we simply have a system that reasserts that and educates that and tries to live up to that then we will be a dramatically better country and other policies follow from it."

There's a lot that's dubious here, beginning with the philological fact that what we mean by secular derives from the medieval use of the Latin saeculum, i.e. the world outside the monastery. The factual historic reality is that the framers of the Constitution, a fair number of whom believed in God, very much intended to set up their novus ordo seclorum on secular lines--sans religious tests for office or religious establishments--much to the consternation of many religious folk at home and abroad. Quelle nightmare!

For that matter, how does it follow that declaring human beings to have been created with certain unalienable rights implies that we as citizens have responsibilities to the Creator, whoever that may be? No Creator makes an appearance in the constitutionally mandated oath of office that Gingrich hopes to take in 2013. And how exactly does having a "system" that reasserts and educates and tries to live up to such a divine obligation square with the First Amendment?

But the real focus of Newt's exercise is the malignant force that for nearly half a century has been relentlessly driving God out of the public square. What is it? Later in the Forum, he specified: "What you have today is an outgrowth of the French Revolution...The French Revolution was an anti-clerical, anti-God rejection of the larger world in favor of secularism." In a word, it's latter-day Jacobins who, in the Gingrichian world view, control academe, the media, the courts, etc.

This is actually pretty malignant stuff, reminiscent of the ugly political campaigns waged in 1796 and 1800 by the Federalists against that notorious Jacobin and alleged atheist who drafted the very founding document that mentions those Creator-endowed unalienable rights--Thomas Jefferson. Of course, Gingrich has never been an ideologue but rather, as George Will quipped the other day, a "rental politician" with a gift of gab. So he doesn't believe a word he says. The problem is, other people do.

With Newt Gingrich now perched atop at least one national poll, it seems like a good time to check out what the man has to say about religion in his latest book, A Nation Like No other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. It turns out there's a certain amount of Bartonish huffing about the Christianism of the Founding Fathers but the basic message is well within the standard view that the U.S. started off pretty exceptionally by prohibiting Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Within a few pages, however, Gingrich is on the warpath against "radical secularists" for attacking "Judeo-Christian morality" and seeking to "banish our Judeo-Christian heritage from public life altogether." And from the list of Supreme Court decisions on pages 86 and 87 you'd think the secularists were succeeding. Thus, Gingrich points to the 1993 case (Lamb's Chapel) permitting a Christian club to be barred from using public school facilities but fails to mention subsequent decisions allowing such access. And he notes the Court's ruling that displays of the Ten Commandments in two Kentucky courthouses were unconstitutional but neglects to mention the Texas display that was deemed OK.

You'd never know that in recent years Court has gone a good way towards opening the door to religious establishments long regarded as unconstitutional--by permitting public funding of religious schools by way of vouchers, allowing subsidization of such schools through tax credits, and denying individuals the right to bring Establishment Clause cases to court. But of course, Gingrich is just engaging in standard GOP culture-war rabble-rousing.

Unfortunately, this particular rabble-rousing virus has now infected the Catholic bishops, who have established an ad hoc committee to cry from the rooftops that religious liberty is under attack in America. In his speech yesterday to the semi-annual meeting of the USCCB, committee chair Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport included the following fanciful analysis of the judicial threat at hand.

We also see that the reach of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is being expanded so as continually to narrow the protections offered by the Free-Exercise Clause, thus turning the First Amendment on its head. The establishment clause was meant to protect the Free-Exercise Clause not the other way around. The result has been that both individual citizens with strong religious convictions and also religious institutions are less broadly accommodated and even marginalized on the grounds that any minimal accommodation somehow constitutes the "establishment" of particular religions in our land. For example, the Conference has been defending against an ACLU lawsuit claiming that HHS's recently abandoned policy that allowed us to serve trafficking victims without also providing them abortions and contraception--a policy that respected our freedom of religious exercise-actually violates the Establishment Clause!

But let us make no mistake. Anti-religious secularism is also a system of belief. In failing to accommodate people of faith and religious institutions, both law and culture are indeed establishing un-religion as the religion of the land and granting it the rights and protections that our Founding Fathers envisioned for citizens who are believers and for their churches and church institutions.

In fact, what has done most to narrow Free Exercise protections of late has not been an extension of the Establishment Clause but the Supreme Court's 1990 Smith decision, which denied Free Exercise challenges to "neutral laws of general applicability." Smith, however, was the brainchild of Antonin Scalia, who hardly qualifies as an anti-religious secularist. Twenty years ago, the Catholic bishops joined the broad coalition that succeeded in persuading Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which overturned Smith--until the Court in turn declared it unconstitutional. But that was back in the last millennium, when the bishops concerned themselves more with legal precision, less with rhetorical hyperbole.