The Rev. Michael Ruffin, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald – that’s down between Warner Robins and Valdosta – has posted an excellent, delicate piece on religion and the coming presidential election.
Read the entire article here – this is only a taste:
In the mid-1970s I asked my late, great father, who would these days be considered something akin to a Blue Dog Democrat, for whom he had voted in the 1960 presidential election. He looked sheepish as he said, “I’m not ashamed that I voted for Nixon, but I am ashamed of why; I was afraid if Kennedy got elected the Pope would be running the country.”
I find it interesting, given the Cold War in which we were engaged at the time, that my father and others did not find Nixon’s Quaker religious affiliation equally or even more troubling, given that faith’s belief in pacifism.
Of course, President Nixon was not a pacifist, was he?
And President Kennedy was not, when it came to his policies, beholden to the Vatican, was he?
As my father and many others have shown, voters tend to pay close attention to the religious affiliations—even though those affiliations may or may not reveal much about the candidates’ actual beliefs—of some candidates and not so much attention to those of other candidates. Put simply, we tend to analyze closely the religion of those candidates whom we oppose on other grounds in the hope that we can find further reason to oppose them.
It will be interesting to see if the left-leaning media examines Gov. Romney’s Mormonism as closely as the right-leaning media examined Sen. Obama’s Christianity.
As I said, there’s more. Go read it. We’ll wait til you get back.
- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider
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