{"id":496,"date":"2011-05-23T09:19:56","date_gmt":"2011-05-23T13:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=496"},"modified":"2011-05-23T15:25:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-23T19:25:17","slug":"whither-evangelicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/whither-evangelicals.html","title":{"rendered":"Whither evangelicals?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m fully prepared to believe that Mitch Daniels’ family proved to be the unleapable hurdle<\/a> in his abortive run-up to the GOP presidential race. Imagine yourself as wife Cheri, having split for the coast to marry on old flame, your husband and young daughters left behind in Boone County, Indiana, and then returned to the nest four years later, going head-to-head with the most assiduously maternal First Lady–to say nothing of the most together family–in the history of the American presidency. I don’t think so.<\/p>\n

How far Daniels could have gone is an unknown never to be known, but he was unlikely to have emerged with a lot of white evangelical support, notwithstanding his readiness to stick a knife into Planned Parenthood. Where that support will go is the big unknown to be known in the race, and the best place to start is with good old identity politics. At the moment, the plausible GOP candidates (sorry, RonPau), include two Mormons (Romney, Huntsman), two Catholics (Santorum, Gingrich), and three evangelicals (Pawlenty, Bachmann, and Palin).<\/p>\n

Palin claims to have<\/a> “the fire in my belly”–which I suppose is better than the bun in my oven, but it looks like she’ll also take the family way out. Bachmann has the fire, no sign of family resistance, but huge problems being taken seriously outside her own special world. Pawlenty is both plausible and has serious evangelical bona fides<\/a>–including having been married by the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson. TPaw officially throws his hat into the ring today. Watch for a gathering of the evangelical powers-that-be behind him.<\/p>\n

Pawlenty’s early win in Iowa and Romney’s early win in New Hampshire will be discounted because both were governors of neighboring states. Then things move South. Evangelicals still don’t trust Mormons. Mitt’s going to have his hands full.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m fully prepared to believe that Mitch Daniels’ family proved to be the unleapable hurdle in his abortive run-up to the GOP presidential race. Imagine yourself as wife Cheri, having split for the coast to marry on old flame, your husband and young daughters left behind in Boone County, Indiana, and then returned to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[54,55],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-republican-race","tag-mitch-daniles","tag-tim-pawlenty"],"yoast_head":"\nWhither evangelicals? - 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\/05\/whither-evangelicals.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Whither evangelicals? - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m fully prepared to believe that Mitch Daniels’ family proved to be the unleapable hurdle in his abortive run-up to the GOP presidential race. 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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\/496","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=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":498,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}