The real issue for religious conservatives isn’t whether they can trust Gingrich. It’s whether they can afford to be associated with him.

More than any other Republican constituency, religious conservatives have good reasons to be wary of Newt Gingrich. As the leader of a right-wing insurgency in the early 1990s, he often kept their causes at arm’s length — deliberately excluding issues like abortion and school prayer from the Contract With America, for instance. As Speaker of the House, he undercut their claim to the moral high ground by carrying on an extramarital affair even as his party was impeaching Bill Clinton for lying under oath about adultery.

During his years in the political wilderness, though, Gingrich found religion – both as a convert to the Roman Catholic Church and as a born-again champion of socially conservative causes. He’s spent the last decade producing books and documentaries about America’s Christian heritage. He raised money for a referendum to recall the judges who legalized same-sex marriage in Iowa. His public rhetoric borrows the tropes of the religious right — emphasizing the dangers of secularism, attacking the usurpations of activist judges, and so on. And when he talks about his checkered personal life, it’s always in the language of sin, repentance and redemption.

Now his path to the nomination depends on this conversion paying off. If Gingrich hopes to outlast Mitt Romney, he needs to win over evangelicals wary of Mormonism and social conservatives worried about Romney’s many flip-flops on their issues. He needs the Republican Party’s values voters to forgive his past indiscretions and embrace him as their champion. And his rise in the polls has prompted a lively debate among religious conservatives, both in Iowa and nationally, about whether they should do just that — whether he’s really changed, whether his various conversions are sincere, and whether they can trust him.

But these are the wrong questions. The real issue for religious conservatives isn’t whether they can trust Gingrich. It’s whether they can afford to be associated with him.
Conservative Christianity in America, both evangelical and Catholic, faces a looming demographic challenge: A rising generation that is more unchurched than any before it, more liberal on issues like gay marriage, and allergic to the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Pat Robertson-Jerry Falwell era.

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