{"id":105,"date":"2010-11-03T22:47:03","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T22:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/obamas-god-gap.html"},"modified":"2010-11-03T22:47:03","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T22:47:03","slug":"obamas-god-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/obamas-god-gap.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s God Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, the aggregate House of Representatives exit poll shows that the good old God Gap is as wide as ever. Pew tells the story<\/a>:
\nIn the great bathtub of voter behavior, everyone sloshed back towards
\nthe Republicans. That’s to say, from the white evangelicals to the
\nnones, the GOP posted gains. Over at Huffpost, Eric Sapp points out<\/a>
\nwith some asperity that among Protestants and Catholics, the gains were
\nconsiderably more substantial than with the electorate as a whole.<\/p>\n

Sapp, who used to labor in the vineyards of Democratic faith outreach,
\nalleges that the Dems abandoned that outreach this time around–and
\nthat if they hadn’t the results might not have been so bad. He makes a
\ngood case that had Catholic outreach been what it was in 2006 and 2008,
\nJoe Sestak would be the next senator from Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

So who’s
\nto blame? Sapp is too, ah, polite to point the finger. But there aren’t
\nmany places to point. The engine for faith outreach after 2004 was
\nHoward Dean’s DNC. Recognizing himself as religiously challenged, Dean
\nsaw the light and hired Leah Daughtry<\/a> to do the thing. But after the 2008 election Obama installed Tim Kaine and the effort came to a halt. How come?<\/p>\n

Last May, WaPo’s Michelle Boorstein drew back the veil<\/a>. You didn’t have to read very closely to conclude<\/a>
\nthat White House religion czar Joshua DuBois had put the kibosh on DNC
\nfaith outreach. With the 1012 reelection effort officially starting
\ntoday, you wonder whether Obama’s people will take Sapp’s message
\nseriously–and tell the boss that something has to be done. I’m betting
\nthey won’t.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Reaction from an administration official: “It is simply
\nnot true that the White House–at any time or in any way–limited the
\nfaith outreach at the DNC.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, the aggregate House of Representatives exit poll shows that the good old God Gap is as wide as ever. Pew tells the story: In the great bathtub of voter behavior, everyone sloshed back towards the Republicans. That’s to say, from the white evangelicals to the nones, the GOP posted gains. Over at Huffpost, Eric…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nObama's God Gap - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/obamas-god-gap.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Obama's God Gap - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"OK, the aggregate House of Representatives exit poll shows that the good old God Gap is as wide as ever. Pew tells the story: In the great bathtub of voter behavior, everyone sloshed back towards the Republicans. That’s to say, from the white evangelicals to the nones, the GOP posted gains. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}