The White House has surprised observers and disappointed some liberal allies by signaling that it is willing to compromise and provide a broader religious exemption in its controversial regulations requiring all employers to provide free contraception coverage.

Given that birth control use is almost universal – even among Catholics – many wonder why the Obama administration could wind up retreating on its pledge.

Here are five reasons that may help explain the political dynamic the president is facing:

1. It’s about religious freedom, not birth control: U.S. Catholic bishops, who led the battle against the Health and Human Services Department mandate, know that they long ago lost their own flock on the contraception issue — 98 percent of Catholics use birth control, according to surveys. So they have carefully reframed the issue as a fight for religious freedom – an effort to keep the government from forcing the Catholic Church and other religious groups to subsidize something that goes against their teachings. That makes it a violation of conscience, a sacred principle that transcends any specific tenet of faith.

That argument also lends itself to the kind of heated rhetoric that plays well in today’s supercharged political atmosphere. For example, bishops and their allies are accusing the president of “anti-Catholicism” and worse: “The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To hell with you!’ ” Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik said after the HHS regulations were announced.

The bishops don’t have as much credibility with the laity as they used to, thanks to the clergy sex abuse scandal, among other things. But Catholics are still a potent tribe, and if outsiders are seen as attacking the church, Catholics can get defensive – and they can get even.

2. Obama has lost even the support of his liberal Catholic allies: Case in point: the HHS mandate has been opposed by liberal and centrist Catholics who have supported the administration on a range of other issues — including the Catholic Health Association and the NETWORK social justice lobby — and even went to bat to help pass health care reform despite threats from the bishops.

The president “utterly botched” the religious exemptions issue, wrote Washington Post columnist and liberal Catholic E.J. Dionne, and “Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

“J’accuse!” Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the liberal National Catholic Reporter, wrote in a florid column that channeled Émile Zola’s famous 1898 letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair. “The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.”

3. It’s not just Catholics: Even though evangelicals and other conservative Protestants generally don’t have religious objections to contraception, they do have a big problem with “big government” and with perceived infringements on religious freedom. Evangelicals – both their leaders and their troops – have never been big Barack Obama supporters anyway, so they were happy to provide any electoral and rhetorical muscle the Catholic hierarchy could not muster.

“We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to religious freedom in our lifetime,” evangelical leaders Timothy George and Chuck Colson wrote in an open letter to their fellow believers on Wednesday (Feb. 8). George and Colson compared the administration mandates to policies enacted in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

4. It gives Republicans a potent campaign wedge issue: Mitt Romney wasted no time in accusing Obama of launching an “assault on religion” by way of the contraception mandate, and he declared that his first act as president would be to overturn the HHS regulations. “Remarkably, under this president’s administration, there is an assault on religion, an assault on the conviction and the religious beliefs of members of our society,” Romney said.

Romney’s rivals, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, were not to be outdone, and ramped up their rhetoric against Obama – while also noting that Romney had accepted similar policies while he was governor of Massachusetts.

In short, this is a political fight that the White House neither wants nor needs in an already tough re-election campaign.

5. Obama needs the Catholic vote: In particular, he needs the support of white Catholics, which is the core of this large swing vote (nearly one-quarter of the electorate). They are concentrated in crucial battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and while Obama won the overall Catholic vote 54 percent to 46 percent in 2008, he lost the white Catholic vote, 47 percent to 53 percent.

“To the extent Catholic voters think of this as a religious liberty issue, it does have the potential to pull Catholic voters toward Republicans or away from Democrats,” John Green, an expert on religious voting patterns and director of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

A poll on the contraception mandate released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute showed Catholics overall tended to support free contraceptive coverage, but white Catholics were evenly split on the issue. The Obama campaign can’t afford to sacrifice any of those votes, or risk watching the issue grow as a political liability when the election season heats up.

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They may not be as large as Catholics or as active as evangelicals, but white mainline Protestants have a big thing going for them this election cycle: they are divided, and possibly persuadable.

That’s according to a new poll released Thursday  that found white mainline Protestants are more evenly split between President Obama and his Republican challengers than other religious groups.

“They’re the most important ignored religious group in the country,” said Dan Cox, research director at the Public Religion Research Institute, which conducted the poll in partnership with Religion News Service.

In a matchup between Obama and GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, mainline Protestant voters are nearly evenly divided, with 41 percent supporting Obama and 43 percent for Romney. The same holds true between Obama and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — each is the choice of 41 percent of white mainline Protestants.

Mainliners — Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Methodists and others — tend to be well educated and civically engaged. They represent about 16 percent of the electorate, and are clustered in some key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

While the poll found lingering evangelical Republican wariness over Romney and a striking preference for Gingrich to lead the party into November, Romney’s campaign remains confident. In a matchup between Obama and Romney, Romney carries evangelicals over Obama, 60 to 22 percent, according to the poll.

“As we’ve seen in the early primaries in South Carolina and Florida, Gingrich has had an edge among these white evangelical Protestant voters,” said Romney pollster Neil Newhouse.

“But importantly, when you look at the general election, Mitt Romney does better at coalescing that voter group against President Obama than Newt Gingrich.”

At 27 percent of the electorate, Catholics remain the largest and most unpredictable swing group. Overall, Catholics went for Obama in 2007, although white Catholics supported McCain while Obama drew support from Hispanic Catholics.

According to the new poll, Catholics support Obama over Gingrich 56 to 32 percent, and also support Obama over Romney, but by a smaller margin: 48 to 40 percent.

Newhouse points out Romney’s relative appeal among Catholics who voted in Florida’s GOP primary on Tuesday: CNN exit polls showed Romney capturing 56 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to Gingrich’s 30 percent and former Sen. Rick Santorum’s 10 percent.

Romney belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gingrich and Santorum are Catholics.

Romney’s appeal, however, is shaky among white evangelicals, an important Republican voting block and about 23 percent of the general electorate. Many evangelicals have deep-seated wariness about Mormonism.

Despite Romney’s decisive win in Florida, Gingrich edged out Romney among white evangelicals, 38 percent to 36 percent, according to the CNN exit poll. In South Carolina, white evangelicals broke for Gingrich over Romney by a 2-to-1 margin.

So what’s going on with Romney among white evangelicals?

The new poll shows that Romney is not their first choice. Among white evangelical Republican voters, Gingrich drew twice as much support as Romney on who they’d like to see nominated, 35 percent to 17 percent. Santorum drew 22 percent.

“Romney is still having trouble sealing the deal with white evangelical Protestants,” said Cox.  “In Florida, percentage-wise among GOP primary voters, he’s been in the high 40s and in the 50s with women, seniors and many other groups. But with white evangelical Protestants he’s having trouble breaking 4 in 10.”

In other poll findings:

– Issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage take a back seat to the economy. Jobs and unemployment was considered a critical issue by 83 percent of all voters, compared to abortion at 29 percent, and same-sex marriage at 25 percent.

– Even among white evangelicals, social issues pale against economic ones, with 82 percent calling jobs and unemployment a critical issue. Just 41 percent called abortion a critical issue, followed by same-sex marriage at 38 percent.

– Fewer white evangelical Protestants (33 percent) consider the growing gap between rich and poor a critical issue than any other religious group, including white mainline Protestants (48 percent) and Catholics (47 percent).

The PRRI/RNS Religion News Survey was based on telephone interviews with 1,005 adults between Jan. 25 and 29. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney released his federal tax returns for the past two years, he disclosed that he and his wife, Ann, gave about 10 percent of their income to their church, a well-known religious practice called tithing.

In that way, the Romneys are typical Mormons, members of a church that is exceptionally serious about the Old Testament mandate to give away one-tenth of one’s income.

But compared to other religious Americans, the Romneys and other Mormons are fairly atypical when it comes to passing the plate. Across the rest of the religious landscape, tithing is often preached but rarely realized.

Research into church donations shows a wide range of giving, with Mormons among the most generous relative to income, followed by conservative Christians, mainline Protestants and Catholics last.

Over the past 34 years, Americans’ generosity to all churches has been in steady decline, in good times and in bad, said Sylvia Ronsvalle, whose Illinois-based Empty Tomb Inc. tracks donations to Protestant churches.

Ronsvalle’s research shows that since 1968, contributions have slowly slumped from 3.11 percent of income to 2.38 percent, despite gains in prosperity.

In her view, churches have failed “to call people to invest in a much larger vision.” She believes that explains why giving to missions, distant anti-poverty programs or faraway ministries has sunk faster than giving for the needs of local congregations.

A recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 79 percent of Mormons said they tithed to their church, a much higher percentage than in the Catholic and Protestant world.

The former Massachusetts governor and his wife slightly underpaid their tithe in 2010 but intend to make it up when their final 2011 income becomes clear, a spokesman for Romney’s campaign told The Associated Press.

Under pressure to disclose, Romney recently released his federal returns, showing he is likely to pay an effective federal tax rate of about 15 percent on $45 million in income over two years.

The returns also showed the Romneys have already donated $2.6 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the 2011 tax year. That brings their church donations to $4.1 million on two years’ estimated income of $42.6 million.

They made other charitable contributions of $3 million as well.

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich’s 2010 return showed charitable donations of $81,000, or about 2.5 percent of his $3.2 million income. About $9,500 went to the National Shrine of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington; the balance of his charitable giving was not disclosed.

President Obama’s return showed donations of $245,000, or about 14 percent of his $1.8 million income. The 36 contributions went to a wide range of secular and faith-based health, educational and community development groups.

A broad study called the U.S. Congregational Life Survey found that only about a third of Catholics, half of mainline Protestants and two-thirds of conservative Christians reached even the 5 percent level of giving.

Researcher Cynthia Woolever said mainline Protestants in her study gave slightly more than evangelicals in absolute dollars, but less as a percentage of income.

Her study did not include Jewish or Muslim congregations because of their smaller numbers.

Ronsvalle and others said generosity tends to be higher among evangelicals because of their regard for the authority of Scripture, where the command is repeatedly found, from Genesis 14, describing Abram’s gift to God of “a tenth of everything” to Malachi 3, in which God promises blessings on those who tithe.

Rick Warren, perhaps the most famous evangelical pastor in the country, has said he “reverse tithes,” giving away 90 percent of his income, including all the profits from his best-selling book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Woolever said Catholics appear at the far end of the spectrum because the Catholic Church does not stress tithing. In addition, she said, Catholic congregations tend to be larger, diluting the sense of individual responsibility for financial support.

No one passes a collection basket at Mormon services. Instead, offerings are mailed or sent in outside of the weekly meeting rite. Mormon leaders keep an accounting, and once a year Mormon families are invited to sit briefly with their bishop, the head of their congregation, and discuss their donations.

It may sound awkward, but it’s not to Brenda Grant, a retired nurse from eastern New Orleans who, with her husband, converted from Catholicism more than 30 years ago.

Grant, like many others who follow the biblical mandate, sees tithing as both a command and a voluntary gesture of gratitude to God. It is also a way to secure continued blessings, she said.

She and her husband, Earl, believe it was partly because of their fidelity through tithing that God sent them blessings after their home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

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If there’s one thing the fractious Republican field agrees on, it’s that personal religious devotion is central to their campaign message.

Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and even Ron Paul stress their faith on the stump; Romney plays up his religion, though he downplays his Mormonism because of lingering evangelical suspicion toward his church.

But a new survey indicates that such a liberal use of “God talk” may actually be more likely to hurt rather than help a candidate’s chances with voters.

According to an online poll conducted last September by the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, only 1 in 6 Americans (16 percent) said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who regularly shares their religious beliefs.

The poll by LifeWay Research showed that 30 percent of respondents indicated they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who prominently touts their religious beliefs and practices; 28 percent said it would have no impact, and 21 percent said it would depend on the candidate’s religion.

“Different people get a different picture in their mind when a political candidate shares or shows their religious convictions,” said Scott McConnell, director of LifeWay Research. “While some Americans warm up to this, many don’t see it as a positive.”

The poll reinforces the conflicted feelings Americans have toward their politicians: A survey last year conducted by Public Religion Research Institute and Religion News Service found majorities of every religious group say it is important that a presidential candidate have strong religious beliefs.

At the same time, respondents — including evangelical Christians — had a hard time identifying the religious affiliation of either President Obama or Romney.

Taken together, the two polls seem to suggest Americans want their politicians to be pious but not preachy.

Not surprisingly, the LifeWay poll found that Americans who consider themselves to be “born-again, evangelical or fundamentalist” Christians are much more likely than nonreligious voters to support a candidate who deploys a very public piety on the stump, by a 28 percent to 11 percent margin.

Similarly, these conservative Christians are more likely to say their support also “depends on the religion” of the candidate.

That may matter more in the GOP primaries than the general election given evangelicals’ outsized role in determining the outcome of the primaries, as was shown in the results of Saturday’s (Jan. 21) South Carolina contest.

The fact that those same evangelicals also say the religion of the candidate matters may be further cause for concern for Romney, who not only lost the South Carolina primary to Gingrich, but also the evangelical vote.

In the survey, respondents were asked: “When a candidate running for office regularly expresses religious conviction or activity, how does that impact your vote?”

The online survey of 2,144 Americans was conducted in September 2011 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

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Almost half of churchgoing Americans say their life has not changed a bit due to their time in the pews, a new survey shows.

Barna Group, an evangelical company based in California, found that 46 percent reported no change. About a quarter of Americans said their life was greatly affected by church attendance and another quarter said it was somewhat influential.

Two-thirds of respondents said they had felt “a real and personal connection” with God while attending church.

Among weekly church attenders, 44 percent said they felt God’s presence every week and 18 percent said they had that experience once a month.

In a finding sure to disappoint pastors, three out of five church attenders said they could not recall an important new religious insight from their last church visit. Of those who attended in the previous week, 50 percent could not recall walking away with a significant new understanding.

David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group, said the research shows that many churchgoers see the benefits of connecting with God and others in congregations.

“Yet, the research results are also a reminder that faith leaders cannot take these things for granted,” he said. “Millions of active participants find their church experiences to be lacking.”

The survey results are based on a random sample of 1,022 adults and have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

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As Christmas nears, more than three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christian, Gallup reports.

Pollsters found that 78 percent of Americans identify with Christianity.

Overall, more than 82 percent of Americans have a religious identity, with this breakdown:

— Protestant/other Christian: 52.5 percent

— Catholic: 23.6 percent

— Mormon: 1.9 percent

— Jewish: 1.6 percent

— Muslim: 0.5 percent

— Other non-Christian religion: 2.4 percent

— None/atheist/agnostic: 15 percent

— No response: 2.5 percent

The findings fit the trend of an increasing percentage of Americans who do not embrace a formal religious identity. In 1951, 1 percent of Americans did not have a religious identity, compared to 24 percent identifying as Catholic and 68 percent claiming a non-Catholic Christian faith.

Gallup found earlier this year that 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God, which suggests that a lack of religious identity is not necessarily linked to atheism.

The results of the religious preference survey are based on 327,244 interviews conducted between January and November 2011. The margin of error for that sample is plus or minus 1 percentage point.

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The world may still have gold and myrrh, but it’s quite possible that frankincense could become a thing of the past, given ecological pressures on the arid lands where it grows in Ethiopia.

The storied resin — known to millions as one of the three gifts of the Magi, the wise men who visited Jesus after his birth — is made from gum produced by the boswellia papyrifera tree. Its “bitter perfume” is used as incense in religious rituals in many cultures, as well as an ingredient in perfume and Chinese traditional medicine.

Dutch and Ethiopian researchers studying populations of the scraggly, scrublike trees in northern Ethiopia found that as many as 7 percent of the trees are dying each year, and seedlings are not surviving into saplings.

Their paper in Tuesday’s (Dec. 20) edition of the Journal of Applied Ecology finds that the Ethiopian trees that produce much of the world’s frankincense are declining so dramatically that production could be halved over the next 15 years, and the trees themselves could decline by 90 percent in the next 50 years.

Frankincense has been harvested in the wild in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa since ancient times.

The frankincense carried by the three wise men probably came from that area but those trees are mostly gone, said Frans Bongers, a professor of tropical forest ecology and management at the University of Wageningen in Holland.

“There’s still some in Somalia, but no one knows how much. The main production area in the world right now is Ethiopia,” said Bongers, who has studied the trees for the past six years.

Specialists have long said frankincense trees aren’t doing well, but the paper is the first hard data on them, and the outlook is not good.

Frankincense is harvested by making cuts in the tree bark during the dry season. A cut is made every two or three weeks, and the resin that emerges to heal the tree is collected.

How much frankincense is produced worldwide isn’t clearly known. Bongers said Europe imports about 400 tons each year, and about half of that goes on to China for use in traditional medicine while the rest goes to churches and perfume makers.

Most of that comes from Ethiopia. A long-term government push to relocate people from the highlands to the lowlands, where the trees grow, is putting tremendous pressure on the ecosystem.

Additionally, a shift in harvesting from large, government-controlled companies to private collectives has increased the pressure to collect larger amounts of resin. The old contracts were for up to 40 years, Bongers said, which gave incentive to preserve the resource. The new contracts can be as short as two years, “so they get what they can get,” he said.

Heavy tapping appears to weaken the trees, making them more prone to attacks by longhorn beetles. Up to 85 percent of fully grown trees that die are heavily infested with beetles, the researchers found.

No new trees are replacing them. The highlanders brought cattle, and seedlings don’t survive to become saplings because cattle eat them and collectors burn the grasslands to make it easier to get to the trees, killing saplings as well, Bongers said.

An Arizona man is trying to stem this tide. Jason Eslamieh, originally from Iran, grows and sells all 19 boswellia species, including the frankincense-producing type, at his nursery in Tempe.

Seeds from the papyrifera subspecies, which makes frankincense, are notoriously difficult to germinate. Only two to eight out of a hundred grow into a plant, said Eslamieh, who authored a book on the topic. He says they must have undergone a population bottleneck due to overharvesting in the past, leaving them inbred and weak. He’s trying to create hybrids that are more vigorous.

His nursery, Miniatree.com, sells more than 100,000 seeds a year as well as 1,000 papyrifera plants. A 4-inch seedling costs $55, and fully mature trees can sell for up to $1,000.

The trees grow readily in Southern California, Florida and parts of Arizona.

Once the trees are about 4 years old, they can be tapped for frankincense. “A small tree is enough for personal use,” he said.

It’s possible that climate change is affecting the trees. Bongers has a research project underway and hopes to have an answer within two years.

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With 2.18 billion adherents, Christianity has become a truly global religion over the past century as rapid growth in developing nations offset declines in Christianity’s traditional strongholds, according to a report released Monday (Dec. 19).

Billed as the most comprehensive and reliable study to date, the Pew Research Center’s “Global Christianity” reports on self-identified Christian populations based on more than 2,400 sources of information, especially census and survey data.

Findings illustrate major shifts since 1910, when two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe. Now only one in four Christians live in Europe. Most of the rest are distributed across the Americas (37 percent), sub-Saharan Africa (24 percent) and the Asia-Pacific region (13 percent).

“In two out of three countries in the world, the majority of the population identifies as Christian,” said Conrad Hackett, lead researcher on the “Global Christianity” report. “I had no idea about that. … I was surprised.”

The report confirms Christianity’s standing as the world’s largest religion, with 32 percent of the global population. Islam is second with about 23 percent, according to a 2009 Pew report.

A close look at the details reveals a few ironies:

— Although Christianity traces its beginnings to the Middle East and North Africa, only 4 percent of residents in these regions claim the Christian faith today.

— Meanwhile, the faith has grown exponentially in sub-Saharan Africa, from just 9 percent of the population in 1910 to 63 percent today. Nigeria, home to more than 80 million Christians, has more Protestants than Germany, where the Protestant Reformation began.

“As a result of historic missionary activity and indigenous Christian movements by Africans, there has been this change from about one in 10 (sub-Saharan Africans) identifying with Christianity in 1910 to about six in 10 doing so today,” Hackett said.

For its part, Europe is more religiously diverse than it was in 1910, when 94 percent was Christian. Still, Europe hasn’t abandoned its Christian heritage, according to the report. Today, 76 percent of Europeans self-identify as Christian.

“Many people may have the impression that a smaller percentage of Europe claims to be Christian” than is actually the case, Hackett said.

The report also sheds light on the difficult question of how many Chinese are Christians. Researchers have struggled to get reliable numbers since China’s policies on religion are thought to discourage Christians from self-identifying as such in official surveys.

Adjusting for such variables, Pew researchers believe Christianity has flourished despite a policy forbidding Christianity among Communist Party members. Researchers estimate the Christian community in China includes 5 percent of the population, or 67 million.

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And so it has come to this.

Newt Gingrich, the career politician and millionaire “consultant” for the health care and mortgage industries, a twice-divorced and thrice-married convert to Catholicism, may be the last great hope of the religious right.

Granted, this is the Republican nominating contest for 2012, which means just about anything can happen, if it hasn’t already.

But Gingrich as the political savior of conservative Christians?

The numbers indicate that’s just what is happening as Republican voters continue to look yearningly past Mitt Romney and abandon Herman Cain’s fading campaign amid multiplying accusations of sexual impropriety.

Or, as The Atlantic’s Molly Ball put it, Gingrich’s personal baggage is “garden-variety adultery and lack of marital commitment,” which “looks downright tame next to what Cain’s been accused of.”

The result: Gingrich’s “positive intensity” among GOP voters — a key metric tracked by the Gallup Poll — has soared while Romney’s has tanked, leading to the widest disparity among the leading candidates so far this year.

More telling is Gingrich’s emergence from the pack in Iowa, a stronghold of the religious right, where he has a 28 percent approval rating to Romney’s 12 percent runner-up rank. And in South Carolina, Christian conservatives are helping Gingrich establish a commanding lead, 38-15 percent, over Romney.

About 40 percent of Republicans in both Iowa and South Carolina identify themselves as fundamentalist Christians or evangelicals, according to a recent NBC News/Marist poll.

Given Iowa’s first-in-the-nation vote on Jan. 3, and South Carolina No. 3 place on Jan. 21 after No. 2 New Hampshire, such faith-based support could prove to be a crucial factor in finally deciding who will be the Republican challenger to President Obama.

There are several reasons why Gingrich has emerged as an unlikely for the Christian right, and why he could have the kind of staying power that others have not:

Discerning voters

The first factor — and perhaps the least appreciated — is that when it comes to politics, conservative evangelicals are far from a bunch of wide-eyed rubes who can be mesmerized by a slick sermon, or stump speech.

“This is a group of voters that has been active in presidential politics for a while now,” said John Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute. “Some evangelicals look at religion, some look at the issues, some look at electability. So they have a number of criteria that they apply.”

Certainly, evangelical suspicions about Romney’s Mormonism come into play, but added to that are deep concerns about the consistency of Romney’s conservatism, and his failure to court social conservatives — two problems Gingrich does not have.

Green and others also note that the religious right hasn’t fallen in love with a candidate since George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. Since then, these “values voters” have grown accustomed to looking around, and they may well be content with the sadder-but-wiser candidate as long as he can win.

“Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community,” Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, told The Daily Beast. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

A modern-day ‘King David’

Certainly that is the line that Gingrich has been pitching.

“I don’t claim to be the perfect candidate,” Gingrich said during a recent radio interview in South Carolina, where his meetings with rock-ribbed Christian leaders have been bearing fruit. “I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anybody else.”

By embracing rather than running away from his past sins, Gingrich is both playing up the kind of “authenticity” that he is famous for — and that voters don’t find in Romney — and he is playing to a Christian narrative that retains great power in the American religious imagination.

“They were willing to take Gingrich’s account that he was a changed man at face value because the drama of sin and redemption is something that fits very well with evangelicalism,” Green said.

Gingrich has doubled-down on that bet by adding a section to his campaign website about his checkered personal past, saying that he “has been honest and forthright about the fact that he has had moments in his life that he regrets, that he has had to seek reconciliation, and go to God for forgiveness.”

So far, that approach seems to be working.

“I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows,” Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host in Iowa, told The Daily Beast.

Unfinished business

Still, the remaining month before the Iowa caucuses is an eternity in this primary campaign, and many conservative pundits are still appalled at Gingrich’s unexpected resurgence.

“Gingrich’s serial adultery and his current hypocrisy suggest not a immoral man, but an amoral one,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote in a classic blast this week.

In addition, he hasn’t closed the deal with social conservatives. Richard Land, an influential Southern Baptist leader, posted an open letter to Gingrich congratulating him on his return “from the political equivalent of hospice care” but warning that he still has work to do to win over evangelical women.

Land suggested Gingrich find “a pro-family venue and give a speech (not an interview) addressing your marital history once and for all.” It might not convince everyone, Land said, but might change enough minds among evangelicals who are “immersed in a spiritual tradition of confession, redemption, forgiveness and second and third chances.”

And that, in the end, might be just enough to make Gingrich the nominee.

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