Ross Douthat has a pretty interesting piece on Newt Gingrich’s relationship with the Christian Right. Rightly, I think, he stresses how a decision to embrace the former Speaker by Evangelicals and conservative Catholics would strike a potentially fatal blow against the Religious Right’s efforts to bridge the generational divide that separates it from America’s youth:
[Gingrich] 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…Rallying around Newt Gingrich, effectively making him the face of Christian conservatism in this Republican primary season, would ratify all of these impressions.
While the age-gap is relevant to the Religious Right, it’s probably not a problem unique to the hard-right “values voters” bloc. Across the board, the generational chasm between the GOP and the Democrats is striking. What that means is that young people are not only less socially conservative than their grandparents, but they’re less economically conservative too. Although, as this Los Angeles Times article makes plain, it’s not quite right to describe the elder generation as the younger’s “grandparents.” In many ways, these people have precious little to do with one another:
Today, two groups — one that came of age under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the other under Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower — look at politics with strikingly different eyes. Americans ages 18 to 29 supported President Obama in a hypothetical matchup with Mitt Romney, the Republican former Massachusetts governor, by a 26-percentage-point margin, according to the Pew data. Those ages 66 to 83, the cutoff age for the survey, backed the Republican by 10 percentage points. Voters overall were evenly split between the two.
The difference between the two groups reflects not just their experiences, but who they are. Four in 10 of the younger group are black, Latino or Asian. By contrast, the oldest group is only 21% nonwhite. Whites in the youngest group still give Obama the edge, but by a considerably smaller margin than their nonwhite peers.
As I’ve written before, these macro-facts make the Gingrich surge a bit less remarkable. Indeed, for many Republicans, looking at Gingrich’s sourdough mug is not unlike looking into a mirror. That’s always been the case. The only difference as of late is that they haven’t wanted to turn away.
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