However, to cite one example from your list, if I believe “fearing God” is an absolute requirement for a candidate in a civil election, I have an immediate problem in this election because the confessions of my church say some pretty seriously negative things against the Roman Catholic Church. I can say what I believe to be true, namely, that there are sincere Christians in the Roman Catholic church who are sincerely wrong, but I can't get around the confessional standards. Gingrich would not be allowed to come to communion in my church, I would not be allowed to do so in his parish, and there are important reasons for that. The Council of Trent said some pretty serious things about us Protestants, too.
There is no major party candidate running this year, with the possible exception of Michele Bachmann, who would have been acceptable to John Calvin or most other leaders of the Calvinist wing of the Reformation — and in her case, Knox would have said some severely negative things about the “monstrous regiment of women” so even Bachmann wouldn't have been acceptable to the founder of Scottish Presbyterianism as a civil ruler.
I'm not a full-blown Kuyperian, but I believe Abraham Kuyper was correct in saying that within the sphere of the church, we need to adhere strictly to the confessions, but because the sphere of the state is not (at least in most modern nations) formally covenanted with God, Christians can cooperate with people in the state who we would never let into church office.
Kuyper fleshes out in theology the way most of the Reformers worked in practice. How did the Reformers actually work in city-states like Zurich, Geneva, and Basel, and how did they work in larger nations like the Netherlands, Hungary, France, Scotland, and England? Henry VIII was far from the only Protestant ruler to have a moral life that makes Newt Gingrich look rather good. The Netherlands would have remained Roman Catholic with tens of thousands of dead Protestant bodies continuing to pile up in the streets if it were not for urban burghers who cared much more about money than God, and if it were not for William of Orange whose background seems fairly close to that of Newt Gingrich.
I wish Newt Gingrich had been discipled by confessional Calvinists or had returned to a confessional version of the largely nominal Lutheranism of his childhood. I think, in reading Gingrich's religious background, that he was served very poorly by the “cheap grace” of much of modern American evangelicalism. However, from what I read of Gingrich's faith, it seems that what he liked about Roman Catholicism is the same thing that has drawn many other neoconservatives into the Catholic orbit — a full-fledged doctrine of church and society which, while wrong, provides an answer to questions that many evangelicals are asking and to which they're not getting answers.
Can I vote for someone like that? Not as a first choice, but at this point my only alternative is Romney or going third-party, and those aren't choices I want to make since they're conceding the 2012 election to Obama.
Of course, we can and probably will agree to disagree. I have a group of Ron Paul supporters in my own church who I have argued against regularly, and that doesn't mean I think they're bad people; I just think they're wrong.
I'm conceding the election to God. I anticipate voting for the Constitution Party.
Of course, we can and probably will agree to disagree. I have a group of Ron Paul supporters in my own church who I have argued against regularly, and that doesn't mean I think they're bad people; I just think they're wrong.
I like Ron Paul and I was going to vote for him but he equivocated on abortion. Abortion is the biggest security, economic and social threat in history, not to mention spiritual. And our party and country are hiding our faces from it. I would say that it makes us vulnerable to God's curse but I think it is God's curse. Every thing else is a deck chair issue.