This is what happens when your endorsement does not go as planned. You are risking more than your 501(c)3 status! The Romney candidacy is going to be very interesting to watch. Should his faith tradition matter? Nope. But there it is. We may not like it, but many people vote with their ecclesial allegiance first. I wonder how a conservative Republican Catholic candidate would do? Would we get to see the old Protestant frustrations emerge?
Prominent S.C. pastor endorsesPosted by tripp at October 27, 2007 07:19 AM
Mitt Romney, then regrets it
By Greg Warner (Associated Baptist Press)SPARTANBURG, S.C. (ABP) -- Don Wilton, a prominent megachurch pastor in the key early-primary state of South Carolina, withdrew his endorsement of Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney Oct. 23.
Wilton, pastor of First Baptist Church in Spartanburg and former president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, said Oct. 19 he was "proud to stand alongside Gov. Romney as he pursues our nation's highest office," according to a press release from Romney's campaign. The announcement received wide local and national media coverage, including stories on CNN. Four days later, Wilton released his own statement saying his endorsement, which he authorized the Romney campaign to announce, was a "personal error."
Southern Baptists and other evangelicals are divided over support for Romney because of his faith. Many consider Mormonism to be a cult or non-orthodox sect of Christianity. Others say Romney's conservative social opinions should override his particular faith.
The Romney campaign, in a press release, said it agreed to withdraw all references to Wilton's endorsement.
Wilton said he made his endorsement as an "individual citizen." Internal Revenue Service rules prevent churches and other tax-exempt organizations from endorsing candidates, but church employees can make individual endorsements.
“While I did give my consent to the local campaign to use my affirmation of the governor’s stance on family values in my capacity as an individual citizen," Wilton said, "I made the mistake of not realizing the extent to which it would be used on a national basis. It was my personal error to agree to support Romney’s campaign.
"Until this incident I had never endorsed any person running for any elected office, Democrat or Republican," he added. "While I have had the privilege of meeting with a number of fine candidates over the years, I continue to believe my role and responsibility is to preach and teach the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Recent polls of Republican voters in South Carolina show Romney gaining ground against frontrunners Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani -- even moving into second place behind Thompson, according to a poll commissioned by the Romney campaign. Romney is currently the only candidate gaining ground on the field.
An endorsement Oct. 16 by officials of the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in Greenville is expected to aid Romney's effort to lure evangelicals and conservatives. But an independent survey after the endorsement found that while 27 percent of S.C. Republicans said the endorsement made it more likely they would vote for Romney, 32 percent said it made them less likely. The same poll found 45 percent of Republican voters said they are less likely to vote for Romney because of his Mormon faith.
The South Carolina primary is scheduled for Jan. 19.
(Spockian raised eyebrow.) Fascinating.
Protestants who'd start their own theocracy if they could, backing a non-Christian. A variation of 'just shut up and vote Republican' like the hypocritical Fr Frank Pavone told that other GOP target market, Roman Catholic values voters?
As you know until the news of it broke I was proud I didn't know which if any church my candidate Ron Paul belongs to. It is irrelevant - he'd get my vote if he or his running mate were partnered gay atheists. He is a born Lutheran - older brother David is an ELCA minister - who later went to church with his Episcopalian wife and had their kids baptised there; now they informally and occasionally go to a Baptist church where one of their children is a member. Rather theologically promiscuous to a Catholic. :)
(One of my political mentors, the late Murray Rothbard, was a Jew by birth and an atheist. I would have voted for Robert Taft in 1952 and Barry Goldwater in 1964, neither of whom had any use for religion personally.)
Regarding Romney (AFAIK an empty suit or neocon shill who'll say nearly anything the commonly understood right wants to hear - 180ing on abortion for example - just to get elected) in theory of course you're right but it all hangs on whether Mormonism is or is not what Protestants historically accused Rome of (around the time of both Al Smith and the unworthy, nominal RC JFK - Cardinal Spellman saw through him, saw through the Camelot PR crap, and rooted for Nixon): does it really want to overthrow the Constitition and set up a theocracy?
I had in-laws who were Church of Christ living in Utah and from what I remember from them the LDSers would if they could. Before the controversial 1963 Supreme Court ruling on school prayer, these were Mormon prayers in Utah. One of these in-laws, a kid at the time, came home and said 'Good! We don't have to pray for the Mormons any more!'
Then there's the matter, irrelevant politically but interesting to theology and history boffins like me, of what exactly Mormons really are. One complication is Christian categories of dissent have gone by different names over the years (rather like 'High Church' doesn't really mean today what it meant in 1700).
In today's Christian terms Mormons are not Christians: they're (here's a cool word) henotheists, believers in many gods like the ancient Greeks but like monotheists worshipping only one, the one they believe is in charge of this world. Who with his wife begets spirit children to populate it and worship him - every good Mormon married couple whose marriage is sealed in the temple is promised that in the hereafter, godhood and a planet to populate with worshippers. (The man becomes a god.)
LDS: essentially 19th-century Presbyterianism on LSD. (BTW Mormon liturgy is pinched from the Freemasons; Smith was an ex-Mason.)
(Joseph Smith began Mormonism as Christian but changed his mind by the time he died in a gunfight. If you believe he was a prophet his later writings have polygamy and the breakaway fundamentalist Mormons are right - LDS banned it to get statehood for Utah but the cops look the other way. But in a really free, religiously neutral society why outlaw it?)
Because Mormons came out of American Protestant culture and use that theological vocabulary ('Church of Jesus Christ', the names of the Persons of the Trinity etc.) many people, like me as a kid, think they're just another conservative Protestant church and I think the Mormons encourage that, sort of lying by omission. I've been told that low-level converts sometimes don't know all the wacko theology they've signed onto. They just want to be family-values Protestants but got more than they bargained for.
Anyway, back to early Christian history: I've read that in patristic times Catholics used the word 'heretic' to describe groups (Marcionists, Manichaeans, Arians) we wouldn't call Christian.
Which may be why Islam has been described as a Christian heresy. Smith could have taken some of his cues from Mohammed. It's been described to me as partly a ripoff of Eastern Christianity, particulary the Nestorian 'off' version that Mohammed's neighbours practised which may partly explain his goofy ideas about Jesus, the Mormonism of Orthodoxy. (And LDS is the Islam of Protestantism!) The mosque is an Eastern Christian church stripped of its icons for example. (Nestorians, the native Christians of what's now Iraq, tend not to have images in their churches but are not opposed to them on principle - their tradition is older than the use of icons. They use lots of plain crosses though and the liturgy is recognisably Eastern with vestments etc.)
In today's terms I say it like LDS is non-Christian of course.
Anyway...
You can spin religious liberty/pluralism to make it compatible with Catholicism (a foundation of my politics and one of Vatican II's valid points).
I could be ignorant but I'm not sure you can do that with Islam or Mormonism.
(Saddam Hussein was a 'bad Muslim', the kind Osama bin Laden hates, running a secular country. Like the 'jack Mormons' in Utah.)
Posted by: The young fogey at October 27, 2007 09:37 AMP.S. If a Roman Catholic real conservative, a Ron Paul, stood for election to high office and had a chance, yes, you'd see the GOP and or Democrats send out subtle (or not?) anti-popery messages appealing to both liberals (pro-abortion for example) and the fundygelicals, messages with deep roots in American history. Not to be confused with a fake conservative like Rick Santorum, or Rudy Giuliani taking his cue from JFK and distancing himself from his church except maybe fudging a bit on abortion to hedge his bets. The concept of a 'Catholic vote' is outdated; the Romans are as divided between values voters and the indifferent secular people following the mainstream as Protestants. (Clinton got that vote in the 1990s, which may also have been because of a residual RC-Democratic-labour connexion, including even social conservatives who didn't switch to the Republicans for Reagan.)
Posted by: The young fogey at October 27, 2007 10:12 AM