{"id":210,"date":"2011-03-22T21:24:19","date_gmt":"2011-03-22T21:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=210"},"modified":"2011-03-22T21:24:19","modified_gmt":"2011-03-22T21:24:19","slug":"as-iowa-goes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/as-iowa-goes.html","title":{"rendered":"As Iowa goes"},"content":{"rendered":"

So goes the GOP? Yesterday’s story<\/a> by the AP’s Mike Glover takes us to the Hawkeye State, where, it seems, social conservatives are the force to be reckoned with. As someone whose brief career as a national political reporter took place during the 1988 cycle, I find it hard to imagine the Republican Party in Iowa as anything but dominated by social conservatives. That was the year that Pat Robertson scared the bejesus out of the late Lee Atwater by beating out his guy, George H.W. Bush, in the Iowa GOP caucuses. That Mike Huckabee took them last time around only goes to prove that two decades later it was the same old story. So why not this time around?<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is that non-Republicans, accessible though they may be to Tea Partyism, don’t seem inclined towards candidates that make the big fuss about abortion and same-sex marriage. So while there’s zero indication that any GOP presidential hopeful is going to go squishy on those issues, they don’t want to be seen to be preoccupied with them. As usual, Ralph Reed has his finger on successful Republicanism when he says, \u201cIf you turn your backs on the pro-family, pro-life constituency you will be consigned to permanent minority status,\u201d Unfortunately, winning that constituency in the first big contest of the primary season requires more than just not turning your back on them. The question is: How do you round them up without scaring everyone else off?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So goes the GOP? Yesterday’s story by the AP’s Mike Glover takes us to the Hawkeye State, where, it seems, social conservatives are the force to be reckoned with. As someone whose brief career as a national political reporter took place during the 1988 cycle, I find it hard to imagine the Republican Party in…<\/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-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nAs Iowa goes - 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\/2011\/03\/as-iowa-goes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"As Iowa goes - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So goes the GOP? Yesterday’s story by the AP’s Mike Glover takes us to the Hawkeye State, where, it seems, social conservatives are the force to be reckoned with. 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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\/210","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=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}