In last week’s column, “Paleo Evangelicals as Reluctant Republicans,” I argued that there are many conservative evangelicals who do not feel quite at home with today’s Republican Party. Some have undoubtedly balked at wholesale commitment to the Republican Party’s general election nominees in ’08 and ’12 because they were not evangelicals. John McCain had some evangelical influences but was not particularly articulate about his own faith, while Mitt Romney is not a Protestant, much less an evangelical. So should the faith of Romney (or President Obama) matter to paleo evangelicals? Yes, certainly — if we are praying for them, or in the (unlikely) event that we have a chance to speak personally to them about their faith. But in the voting booth, their personal faith does not matter — or at least it is not decisive. Faith-related public issues, however, may well be decisive.
As I have written before, evangelical Christians have often supported candidates with very different faiths from their own, most notably in the 1800 presidential election, when Baptists in particular overwhelmingly backed Thomas Jefferson [“When Baptists Voted for a Heretic”]. Baptists supported Jefferson largely because of his belief in religious liberty, an issue which remains one of the most significant to evangelicals today. So yes, we may vote for a candidate of a different faith from our own — and unless you choose a third party candidate, or decline to vote for president this year, evangelicals will do so.
The 1980 presidential election is quite instructive here. That year, you had Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Baptist who could comfortably give an articulate testimony about his conversion experience, running against Ronald Reagan, a man with deep evangelical influences but a personally indeterminate faith. Evangelicals affiliated with the Moral Majority set a key precedent when they decided, based on issues such as abortion and school prayer, to support Reagan over one of their brothers in the faith.
This year, evangelicals really don’t have an equivalent choice before them, since neither major candidate is an evangelical, and unlike 2008, neither of the vice presidential candidates are, either. Paleo evangelicals, skittish about American civil religion as they are, do not need to engage in any euphemistic contortions about Romney’s faith to make it seem more compatible with ours. (Few evangelicals of any sort would attempt to do so with the president’s liberal Protestant faith; I remain puzzled by Mike Huckabee’s statement at the Republican convention that Obama is a “self-professed evangelical.”)
By all appearances, Romney is serious about Mormonism, a solid family man, and very charitable. But his beliefs about Christ, the church, the nature and future of humans, and the way of salvation, are (assuming he has conventional Mormon views on these topics) starkly different from those of evangelicals. So be it. America is not our church, and we’re not electing a pastor.
Of much greater concern to paleo evangelicals are issues such as which candidate is more likely to support religious liberty, to protect the life of the unborn, and to nominate judges who support those priorities. Depending on their perspective, other paleo evangelicals might ask what candidate will keep us out of war, support the historic definition of marriage, enact firm but charitable immigration policy, emphasize strong families and local communities over the federal behemoth, and/or manifest a truly bipartisan approach to solving problems. And surely all of us want a president who has the integrity and competence to manage the demands of the job.
A president’s faith will be related to all these issues. Real faith, after all, is not private; it colors all our beliefs and actions. But personal faith should not be our main concern when voting for president.
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