Wednesday, December 21, 2011

New York Times editor calls Santorum an evangelical


New York Times editor calls Santorum an evangelical

Joshua Mercerby Joshua Mercer
118 days ago
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Bill Keller is the Executive Editor of the very proud New York Times. One has to be pretty sharp to climb up the journalistic ladder to land such a perch.
Or not.
Keller wrote:
We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

Wait, wuh?
Rick Santorum is not an Evangelical. He is a Roman Catholic. And we Catholics aren’t subsets of anything else. Listen, Mister, every other Christian group broke off of us



But seriously, how does one miss something that easy? Santorum has been in the national spotlight on the issues of abortion and marriage for almost 20 years. Is it that Keller sees a passionate defender of life and marriage and just assumes “Yup, he’s got to be an evangelical Christian”? If an average voter made that mistake, I wouldn’t be surprised. But Keller is Executive Editor of the New York Times!

Anyway, the main point of Keller’s article is that, gosh, so many of these Republicans candidates are members of religious communities that are so “weird.” I imagine East Coast elites like Keller consider evangelicals weird. I mean, these are Protestants that take their faith seriously! Can’t have that!

But most Americans don’t think of evangelical Christianity as weird. Billy Graham and Rick Warren are beloved by millions of Americans.

But Keller is actually right about the potential problems facing Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Liberals hate Mormons because they financially support the effort to keep marriage as a union of one man and one woman. (I know, an irony that would have surprised our 19th century ancestors.)

But there are millions of evangelical Christians and certainly some Catholics that would have trouble supporting a Mormon for president. How many? I don’t know. While Mormons claim to follow Jesus, they do not believe in the Trinity — a core teaching of the Christian faith shared by Catholics and Protestants alike.

My problem with Mitt Romney is his liberalism and his history of flip-flopping, not his Mormon faith. After all, I would certainly be willing to vote for Sen. Mike Lee if he ever ran for President.

HT: Guy Benson

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