Mike Huckabee

Former Arkansas governor and Religious Right favorite Mike Huckabee has not been having a good year.

Huckabee won the Iowa GOP caucus in 2008 and hoped to repeat that magic in 2016. But he ended up struggling for attention in a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates.

In an effort to gin up his far-right evangelical base, Huckabee traveled to Kentucky in September of 2015 for a campaign rally with Kim Davis, a clerk in Rowan County who became a folk hero to the Religious Right after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

We’re fast approaching the one-year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that had the effect of extending marriage equality nationwide.

The Iowa caucuses are today, and, despite what you may have heard, Jesus Christ is not appearing on the ballot.

Several of his close friends are, though. As voting approaches, Republican candidates have been working hard to win endorsements from prominent conservative evangelicals by explaining just how much they plan to mix up religion and government if elected.

Here’s a round-up of recent activities of note:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) has decided the Religious Right isn’t actually religious enough for his liking.

When most people consider the qualities they want in a president, things like the ability to manage the economy, forge political compromises and tend to foreign policy come to mind.

But U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has an additional qualification: He believes it’s absolutely essential that the president be a believer who prays regularly.

The “Values Voter Summit” (VVS), an annual Religious Right gathering in Washington, D.C., took place over the weekend. The rhetoric at the confab, which is now in its 10th year, is pretty consistent: speakers preach Christian “persecution,” Islamophobia, homophobia, dissatisfaction with the federal government and religious revivalism to whip about 3,000 attendees into a frenzy.

The Washington Post over the weekend published a rather silly column online by Judd Birdsall, managing director of the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies, asserting that opponents of same-sex marriage had reacted gracefully to Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court.

Conventional wisdom holds that social issues won’t have much impact on the 2016 presidential election. Americans are more concerned about jobs and the economy, and besides, some recent polls show that Americans are less religious and moving to the left on social issues.

That’s the conventional wisdom. But there’s a problem – conventional wisdom can be, and often is, wrong.