“These folks are not professional theologians and, except in a few cases like Huckabee, they haven’t been to seminary,” said Gary Smith, author of “Faith & the Presidency” and a historian at Grove City College, a Christian school in Pennsylvania. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 GOP presidential hopeful, is a Southern Baptist minister.
“Most of them haven’t had more education about the relationship between Christianity and politics than the average person on the street,” Smith said. “While they have their own personal faith, it isn’t usually well informed by history and theology.”
Voters have started pushing for specifics because they no longer consider belief separate from action and faith unrelated to policymaking, said Kathleen Flake, who specializes in American religious history at Vanderbilt University.
Attacking the GOP on religion is the latest talking point from the Left. This week, the page reserved by my local paper for national opinion pieces ran two right next to each other. One from Krugman and the other from a less notable flapping lip on the NYT payroll. I gave up wasting time on Krugman a long time ago and quick realized the other author was just as silly.
I think the good thing is that the American people have pretty much figured out that the mainstream media is phony and ethically corrupt and have stopped paying attention. Look for the mainstream media, as instructed, to hype up Dear Leader’s latest upcoming pronouncements on how he is going to create jobs, and for the American people to totally ignore it.
[blockquote]Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a 2012 contender, is perhaps the first presidential candidate claiming the “spiritual, not religious” mantle.
He was raised Mormon but said he is not very active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Huntsman’s wife, Mary Kaye, who was raised Episcopalian, told Vogue magazine, “We are a family that combines two, and it works for us.”[/blockquote]
I won’t even try to figure out what Mrs. Huntsman was trying to say in Vogue, but Huntsman is clearly the favorite Republican of those, like the Vogue editor, a major Obama fundraiser, who will never vote for him or any Republican. A just posted NY Times analysis of “the leading Republicans” discusses Perry, Romney, Bachmann and … Huntsman. Not Paul, Cain, Gingrich or others who are well ahead of Huntsman in the polls, but Huntsman, who is vying with several others I have never heard of to hit 1% and become the asterisk in the race. Yet he is the main man for Vogue and one of the four leading candidates for the “newspaper of record”.
“Spiritual, but not religious”, combining Mormons and Episcopalians, NY Times, Vogue, “leading Republicans”, all the news that is fit to print–and then some. You can’t make this stuff up.
I would vote for a Mormon before I voted for an Episcopalian. Come to think of it, I have. At least twice.
[i]I would vote for a Mormon before I voted for an Episcopalian[/i]
Very much out of curiosity, may I ask “why”?
All the Mormons I have known are honest, ethical people. The large majority of politicians I know who are “Episcopalians,” in fact, all of them I know personally, are not.
Claiming to be a “Christian” by being an “Episcopalian” is pretty much a confession they are phonies (e.g., they want a convenient and politically correct assertion of a “religion” that is “spiritual but not religious”), and they are generally phonies and dishonest in other respects as well. And generally believe in things I won’t support in a politician, such as abortion, same sex marriage, etc.
Don’t just include Episcopalians here, politicians who claim to be members of the UCC almost always fit into the super-phony category, as well as a lot of those in other mainline churches.
RE: “Theology a hot issue in 2012 GOP campaign”
Honestly I doubt it. I mean — I love theology, but I’m not thinking about it a whit. I’ll be judging which person out of all of them is both 1) the most committed to limited government, a Constitutional republic, the free market, private property, and individual liberty and 2) is electable. That takes care of all the fake issues the writer came up with that are supposedly about “religions” — abortion, for instance, nicely falls in conservative values and I don’t care what “theology” the candidate uses in order to get to the quite obvious conclusion that killing babies in the womb violates the principles of all of our founding documents.
I don’t care if that person is a Mormon or an Episcopalian — in fact we had somebody like the latter as an Episcopalian as our governor and he was great, until he decided to run off to Argentina and have an affair [hey, at least we didn’t find out he was gay].
And I don’t think the vast vast majority of Americans care a whit about “theology” either.
The only teensy percentage of Americans who care about the theology of the candidates are those liberals who are deeply concerned about whether a conservative believes in evolution or some other little construct they wish to think will resonate or outrage the voters.
I’ve got news for them — the vast vast vast majority of Americans do not care about whether somebody believes in evolution or not either. In fact, a huge chunk of Americans don’t believe in evolution at all themselves, so the liberal intelligentsia are barking up the wrong tree there. Maybe they can go find some other “theological” issue about which to concern themselves.