And your tagline. We can dream, can't we?
Posted on 03/24/2012 6:41:51 AM PDT by NYer
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, March 22, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Politicians usually calculate every action to maximize their popularity among future voters, especially during an election year. But a prominent leader of the nation’s second largest denomination says President Barack Obama’s HHS mandate has the potential to unite Catholics and Protestants into a coalition that will turn him out of office in November.
Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “The thing that frightens our opponents the most is the specter of an evangelical-Catholic alliance – because they can count.” He told listeners of his radio program, Richard Land Live, “You take evangelicals, and you take Roman Catholics, and you are over 50 percent of the population of the country.”
Land said, while two-thirds of Baptists voted for “born again” candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976, the vote began to turn against Democrats in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that Catholic voters are turning against the president as the election nears.
On Thursday Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, cited a new poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that found the number of white Catholics who saw the Obama administration as “hostile” to religion climbed from 17 percent in 2009 to 31 percent. In a press release e-mailed to LifeSiteNews.com, he said, “It is not hard to fathom why the Obama administration is having a hard time with Catholics.” In addition to the HHS mandate, “the administration recently denied funding to a Catholic social service agency that helps women and children merely because it is pro-life.”
Looking ahead to the election Donahue said, “Everyone knows that Protestants vote Republican, and Jews vote Democrat. It’s Catholics who are up for grabs.”
Exit polls show in 2008, 78 percent of Jewish voters supported Obama, and 73 percent of evangelical Christians voted for John McCain. Meanwhile, 54 percent of Catholics cast their ballots for Obama. In 2004, they narrowly favored George W. Bush over fellow Catholic John Kerry.
Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, told LifeSiteNews.com that Southern Baptists tend to vote for candidates who share their convictions about life and faith, not because of anything their church is doing, but because more conservative people are drawn to evangelical churches.
“Frankly, I’m disappointed that more pastors in the Southern Baptist church don’t encourage their members to get out and vote,” he told LifeSiteNews. “Our primary mission is to win people to faith in Jesus Christ, but we’re also called to be salt, preservatives in our society to prevent a premature collapse of our society.”
For generations, Christians saw politics as something dirty or beneath them. Pastor Jeffress disagrees. “Politics simply means to be influencing the culture in which you’re living,” he said. “I believe as Christians we are called to influence our culture.”
He dedicated a chapter in his book Twilight’s Last Gleaming to ministers, entitled “For Pastors Only.”
“I believe pastors need to boldly stand, not for partisan politics, but for Biblical issues like the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage, and encourage their people to vote for those who uphold those Biblical standards,” he told LifeSiteNews.com.
Signs of a burgeoning evangelical-Catholic alliance against the secular state are multiplying. In February, members of the Southern Baptist Convention sat side-by-side Catholic Bishop William Lori in a House Oversight Committee hearing to defend religious liberty.
Land’s comments came during an interview promoting the new book Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late by Southern Baptist televangelist James Robison and Roman Catholic scholar Jay Richards.
Former Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee told the CPAC convention in Washington, D.C., “We are all Catholics now.”
It is unclear how important such an alliance will be to the president’s re-election prospects, let alone future Democrats’ electoral fortunes. Strategists say Obama will be the first president to entirely write off white working class voters. If unaddressed, changing demographics will marginalize the shrinking white vote as they have other decreasing ethnic groups.
Jeffress, who caused a controversy when he endorsed Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican presidential primaries last October, said preachers need to regain a sense of their prophetic ministry to the broader culture.
“In the Bible, prophets didn’t just speak to their own people, but they actually confronted ungodly cultures and ungodly leaders,” he said.
Are you SURE
you want me to get into . . . yet again . . .
where we perceive RC’s to have dropped the ball 1600 years ago and yearly since then?
No — I don’t care what Protestant charlatans perceive.
God bless James Robinson! Would that more preachers and men of the cloth would speak as clearly to the decisive issues of the day!
BUMP! Indeed.
What a charitable conciliatory and edifying response.
/s
Yes, I guess you are right. This is about freedom vs slavery. I have only met a very very few "atheists" in my life. Some of those few have seen the light since then.
Indeed.
I’ve long appreciated his candor and his humility.
I think he and John Wimber long demonstrated humility way above average for Christian leaders in our era.
“Whoop-de-doo!” Indeed /sarcasm
BUMP!
and the heretics suffer needlessly for it.
were it not for the Church, Protestants would be that enemy's plaything.
OMG that's a flipping riot.
Listen, hotshot, you'd have a better case telling Michael Tyson how throw a jab.
OMG that's a flipping riot.
Listen, hotshot, you'd have a better case telling Michael Tyson how to throw a jab.
I agree with your post #37.
Is it "defaming" to state a fact? Like it's "racist" to criticize obama?
You do your own homework, kiddo.
I couldn't agree with you more, dearest sister in Christ!
Thank you so very much for your astute observation!
God's Name is I AM!
I am both charitable and conciliatory. There is good reason for Evangelicals to join the Catholic fight for religious freedom and I hope they do, for their own sake. Such effort will be, for Protestants, reflective of their own political history, and will bring out the best in them. There are limits to that, — ultimately neither confession can achieve fruits political before it nourishes fruits spiritual,— but cooperation is entirely possible — it has always been.
Come on mate. Yeah, there are plenty of Catholic bashers about, like there are plenty of protestant bashers, creationists vs evolutionists etc, but you are hunting the wrong trail this time.
Quix asks questions and is great fun to talk to and debate our differences with. We have discussed differences many times, both in thread and in mails and he is never impolite. Be warned though, he’ll tie you into knots if you chose one wrong word!
Sorry for butting in, but I hate to see a good person maligned.
Thanks for your kind, discerning and perceptive reply.
I don’t really plan a return to past . . . festivities . . . though if some turn ruthless enough, I might reconsider.
I merely wanted to caution the fiercer RC’s that this was not a wise or good thread on which to trash with old hostilities.
If I can be on my better behavior . . . most anyone should be able to be so.
And the cause is well worth every bit of kind, thoughtful and polite conciliatory cooperativeness we can all muster.
imho.
God’s best to you, Bro. You are a treasure.
And your tagline. We can dream, can't we?
My sincere apologies to Quix. Indeed, my post 42 might be read as if calling Quix personally a “Protestant charlatan”. My meaning was that Protestantism as a whole is invented by charlatans such as Luther and Calvin, and crowned whoring weasels like Henry VIII: it does not have a solid biblical and theological foundation. The Protestants today simply follow the myths the Protestant culture inculcated in them and cannot be called charlatans. Further, rather than calling them names, they should be debated, and defeated, on the Holy Scripture alone, every time they advance their theological fantasies.
Outside of the realm of theology, furthermore, the field of cooperation between the Chrisitan confessions in the struggle against the non-Christian world has never been wider, and such cooperation is welcome.
Oh, I look forward to debating you in the future many times!
You force something that happens rarely in day to day life - you make me examine my faith and the Church. Even though I may not be able to explain things to you, it makes my faith deeper.
There are many wonderful non-Catholics here on FR. Figure The Lord knows his own, irrespective of denomination.
Yeah, I know, penance again ....
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