Newt is many things, but his hostility to secularism is one of the more recent and impassioned of his convictions. And it's this drive to found the United States on explicitly religious grounds that has won him the support of so many Christianists. The checkered marital past is not as important as Gingrich's new faith, and his new faith is less important than his defense of "Judeo-Christianity" in both America and around the world. There's been some internal debate among evangelicals over whether to forgive Newt his past – and the consensus seems to be yes. Note why:
On the same e-mail chain, which CNN obtained from a conservative activist, prominent Atlanta preacher Richard Lee said the nation’s evangelicals needed to support Gingrich. Lee called Gingrich “the only forceful Christian candidate who can at this point be elected and cleanse the White House next November.”
Don't you love that word "cleanse"? The current president is a devoted family man, devoid of any personal scandal, and a committed Christian, as his speeches and books testify to. And this must be "cleansed"? The reason is that Obama represents a more liberal and live-and-let-live version of Christianity, and believes in the separation of church and state. That's what needs to be cleansed (assuming we are not talking bald-faced racism here).
What Newt represents is the tip of the spear of the Christianist attempt to wipe separation of church and state out of the constitution. And in this struggle, the denominational differences do not count as much as the secular enemy. Gingrich is also not an old-style Catholic – in the Kennedy or Cuomo or Biden manner. He is an ideological Benedict XVI Catholic, bent on public and political Christianity as a means of saving what's left of civilization after the great Electro-Magnetic Pulse.
The main danger here is not, to my mind, domestic. The real danger is what Gingrich would do in the wider world. With Bolton as his secretary of state, gripped of the conviction that we should launch two more pre-emptive wars against North Korea and Iran, paranoid of existential threats to an extent that would out-Cheney Cheney, determined to fuse America's foreign policy with Israel's in a religious war between Judeo-Christian fundamentalists and Jihadists … it would be hard to come up with a more alarming prospect than Newt with a capacity to wage war, under the unilateral parameters set up by George W. Bush and tragically reasserted and legitimized by Obama in Libya. There is not a global conflict Gingrich would not further inflame; not a diplomatic relationship he wouldn't occasionally blow up (apart from Israel, which would effectively be seen as indistinguishable from the United States itself).
Every day, it seems, the tectonic plates of our world shift. And what I see in Gingrich is the relentless rise of fundamentalism as the overwhelming threat to liberal democracy and world peace.
The Dish 