Until last year, Republicans owned religious voters. “That changed under their disillusionment with Bush,” according to Strother.

Social conservatism became part of the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, when the party's abortion plank was altered to be strongly pro-life at the 1980 Republican National Convention.

“In addition, as the Republicans gained more ground in the South during the ’80s and ’90s, picking up House, Senate and gubernatorial contests, social conservatives became a larger constituency in the GOP,” said Villanova University political scientist Lara Brown.

As "liberal" (meaning socially libertarian but fiscally conservative) Rockefeller Republicans moved into the Democrats’ column, the GOP moved further right because not many social moderates were left to pull the party back to the middle.

George W. Bush capitalized on these 20-year trends in 2004, as he and Republican strategist Karl Rove courted Christian conservatives to win a second term.

Obama the candidate never pretended to be anything he wasn’t on abortion. He didn’t need to: It really was “the economy, stupid” (Bill Clinton’s old campaign adage) in this election. After Lehman Brothers failed, the U.S. House failed to pass the first bank bailout bill and the rest of the economy tanked, voters put their faith in Obama.

“It just changed everything,” Villanova’s Brown said. “Plus, Obama worked to present himself as a religious person. ... That made religious conservatives feel more comfortable with him.”

She, Strider and Strother all agree that, for Republicans, social conservatism is not dead; it’s just on the back burner until the economy – the most pressing issue for most voters – gets back on track.

“As you see Obama become the urban politician that he is, his actions are going to cause social conservatives to get fired up again,” Strother warned.

“They will circle the wagons and the ‘born again’ churches will become more the force for the Republican Party again, the way they were with Bush.”

That’s the law of action and reaction: When belief is powerful, actions based on opposite beliefs will produce strong reactions.