{"id":490,"date":"2011-05-20T08:25:11","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T12:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=490"},"modified":"2011-05-21T08:15:41","modified_gmt":"2011-05-21T12:15:41","slug":"no-more-social-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/no-more-social-conservatives.html","title":{"rendered":"No more “social conservatives”"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the presidential election cycle getting up to speed, it’s time for reporters and yakkers like me to stop writing about “social conservatives” as if they were an identifiable segment of the voting population. I say this as someone who has happily been using the term since late 2008<\/a>, when it looked like the religious right was at least organizationally in eclipse, and that the GOP was engaged in a struggle to balance the competing interests of three types of conservatives: social, economic, and foreign policy.<\/p>\n

But, as we’ve learned from survey data on Tea Party adherence, social conservatism is thoroughly enmeshed with economic conservatism. Even libertarian standard-bearer Ron Paul opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Paul’s heterodoxy is in the foreign policy realm. American conservatives as a whole are way closer to neocon exceptionalism than to Pauline isolationism.<\/p>\n

The point is that these days, virtually all self-described conservatives are social conservatives–and any GOP presidential candidate who wants to be viable has to present himself or herself as one too. The relevant lines of differentiation remain religious. It’s white evangelicals, not “social conservatives,” who looked to Mike Huckabee as their paladin. Social conservatives who happen to be Mormon disliked Huckabee and have Mitt Romney to cleave to. As for frequent Mass-attending white Catholics, they strongly preferred McCain over Huckabee last time around, and need to be carefully differentiated this time around.<\/p>\n

Relying on “social conservatives” to analyze the race for the GOP presidential nomination conveniently secularizes our political discourse. For even as religion has always served as a marker of their voting patterns, Americans have always felt uncomfortable about owning up to it. But the term obscures the real divisions in the Republican electorate. Let’s drop it.<\/p>\n

Update: <\/strong>Another way to make the point is by noting that the GOP has simply become the (increasing isolated) political home of social conservatism. Thus, according to the latest Gallup Survey<\/a> showing that most Americans now support same-sex marriage, support among Democrats and Independents has shot up remarkably over the past year, while support among Republicans has not shifted at all.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the presidential election cycle getting up to speed, it’s time for reporters and yakkers like me to stop writing about “social conservatives” as if they were an identifiable segment of the voting population. 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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\/490","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=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":492,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions\/492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}