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{"id":2345,"date":"2012-02-20T18:20:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T18:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/02\/phony-theology-and-evangelical-identity-politics.html"},"modified":"2012-02-20T18:20:00","modified_gmt":"2012-02-20T18:20:00","slug":"phony-theology-and-evangelical-identity-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/02\/phony-theology-and-evangelical-identity-politics.html","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPhony theology\u201d and evangelical identity politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

By Steve Kornacki
Salon<\/p>\n

For decades, the center of power in the Republican Party has been shifting southward, and the concentration of evangelical Christians within the party has been rising. So there\u2019s some irony in the fact that as a series of crucial primaries in southern states approaches, the GOP race has, at least for now, become a two-man fight between a Mormon from Massachusetts and a Roman Catholic from Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

That Mitt Romney faces particular suspicion from the evangelical voters who have come to dominate southern Republican politics is old news. In his 2008 campaign, the former Massachusetts governor tried to run as the right\u2019s default non-John McCain choice, a strategy that made Dixie crucial to his efforts. But in one southern state after another, Romney lagged badly among evangelicals (many of whom flocked to Mike Huckabee), preventing him from posting the breakout victories he badly needed. And so far in this campaign, polls suggest that the South remains unusually hostile to \u2014 or at least skeptical of \u2014 Romney.<\/p>\n

The assumption is that Romney\u2019s Mormonism<\/a> plays a significant role in this. The bulk of southern evangelicals are Baptists and Pentecostals, who tend to be extra-resistant to the idea that the Mormon and Christian faiths are at all compatible and who may be extra-reluctant to vote for a candidate they consider so fundamentally different from them. As Robert Jeffress, the Texas Baptist leader who has called Mormonism \u201ca theological cult,\u201d put it a few months ago, \u201cto those of us who are evangelicals, when all other things are equal, we prefer competent Christians to competent non-Christians who may be good, moral people like Mitt Romney.\u201d
Read more here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"