Last night's exit polls showed Mitt Romney barely edging out Mike Huckabee in cornering the evangelical vote, 34-29%. About 40% of the Republican electorate in Michigan self-identifies as born-again or evangelical, but as I've argued before, not all of them hate Mormons, not all of them are as staunchly conservative as Huckabee on church-state separation, abortion, and gay marriage, and some of them, in Michigan's open primary might have even been Democrats! (The exit polling doesn't ask Democrats if they are born-again or evangelical.) As they head into South Carolina, however, the Republican candidates face a very different evangelical voter than than in Michigan. The Palmetto State is heavily Southern Baptist (Huckabee's denomination) and support for him among those voters runs high. Yesterday I chatted with Fred Astin , who works for the Beaverdam Baptist Association, a coalition of 70 Southern Baptist churches located in Seneca, South Carolina. Astin, who attended the November...

Earl Paulk , televangelist and former pastor to the now almost defunct Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Atlanta, was charged with perjury yesterday, for lying under oath in a lawsuit brought by a former congregant, Mona Brewer , who charges that he forced her to have sex with him over a fourteen year period. In sworn deposition testimony in the suit, Paulk admitted to having sex with Brewer, but said it was consensual. The perjury charge comes in because he testified that she was the only woman he's had sex with outside his marriage. (At least a dozen women, including his own granddaughter, have accused him of sexual abuse.) But late last year, court-ordered paternity tests confirmed something that had been rumored for years: that the 80 year-old Paulk was actually the father of his nephew, Donnie Earl Paulk. In other words, he had slept with his brother's wife. During the George H.W. Bush administration, the president bestowed upon Paulk one of his "thousand points of light" accolades...