My understanding is that Michele Bachman has formally withdrawn her membership from her longtime local church which is a member of the Wisconsin Synod. Where does she attend church now? Where is her membership? (Yes, I know those questions can have very different answers.) If she does not believe that the Pope is the Antichrist, she probably doesn't belong in the Wisconsin Synod, but we have very good reason to ask where she attends now.
The problem isn't Keith A. Fournier’s article in “Catholic Online;” he's a conservative Catholic and understands the issues of cooperation in the political sphere alongside people with whom we have serious theological disagreements. The problem is that people like Joshua Green, writing the original article in “The Atlantic” which generated this controversy, understand enough about conservative Protestants to know that we take our doctrine seriously. Green, not Fournier, is the one who may have an agenda to divide conservatives.
I don't know how much President Obama learned from Rev. Jeremiah Wright's preaching, but I definitely **DO** know that a conservative Christian can be expected to pay a great deal of attention to what his or her pastor and church are teaching. Because of that, we need to pay attention to what church a conservative presidential candidate attends — that's part of why Gov. Mitt Romney's Mormonism is coming under significant scrutiny, and the same not only will but **SHOULD** happen to any conservative candidate for office. What church people choose to attend says a great deal about them, at least if they are conservatives who takes their religion seriously.
In that connection, we need to realize that the Wisconsin Synod is not a middle-of-the-road Lutheran body, or even a moderately conservative body. They're hardcore, they take Lutheran doctrine very seriously, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they maintain the historic Protestant position (not just Lutheran position) that the Pope is the Antichrist.
The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod is to broader conservative Lutheranism (i.e., the Missouri Synod) as the Orthodox Presbyterians (with men like J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til) are to the Presbyterian Church in America (with men like Dr. D. James Kennedy, James Montgomery Boice, etc). A similar comparison might be between an independent fundamental Baptist church and a conservative congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention. Americans who pay attention to religious issues are fairly familiar with the Missouri Synod brand of Lutheranism, which, compared to the liberal ELCA type of Lutheranism, is clearly evangelical. However, the Wisconsin Synod is quite a bit farther right than the Missouri Synod, and it is definitely not part of the mainstream evangelical American consensus.
(Maybe, to be a bit snarky, I could say that the Wisconsin Synod's relationship to broader Lutheranism is comparable to Free Republic's relationship to country club Republicans? I don't think the idea of being hardcore on doctrinal beliefs will be difficult for Freepers to understand; the Wisconsin Synod people are the Lutherans who blast others for being “Lutherans in Name Only” though they probably wouldn't call them “LINOs.”)
The fact is that the Wisconsin Synod holds many other positions besides their view on the Pope which are far to the right of the current consensus in conservative Christianity. How many of us, for example, practice closed communion and bar people who are not part of our doctrinal tradition from the Lord's Table? We've gotten used to the idea that Sarah Palin’s background in the Assemblies of God meant she went to church with people who spoke in tongues, but a strictly conservative Lutheran church body like the WELS has many other practices and beliefs that will look far stranger to a lot of evangelicals — even though you can defend them much better from the Bible and church history than tonguespeaking. After all, it was Martin Luther who said that similar people in his day sounded like they had “swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all.”
My point here is not to attack the Assemblies of God or the Wisconsin Synod, but rather to point out that the WELS is being consistently Lutheran and it says more about the modern American church and its lack of historical and doctrinal knowledge that the Wisconsin Synod's view of the Pope seems strange.
You'd find similar statements about the Pope in nearly every major Protestant confession, and the Council of Trent wasn't exactly gracious toward Protestants. For example, I was required many years ago by my church to publicly declare my agreement with the teaching of the Heidelberg Catechism that the Roman Catholic Mass is idolatry. Speaking as someone who did my senior thesis on John Henry Cardinal Newman, Roman Catholicism once had a fair amount of attraction for me, and I did not come lightly to the point that I could affirm the historic Protestant doctrinal statements against Roman Catholicism. It took quite a few years to become convinced, and when I affirm those positions today, I do so with full knowledge of what I am saying and why I am saying it. If I didn't agree with the doctrinal standards of my church and didn't think they were biblical, I would leave, and I would expect nothing less from a Roman Catholic who could not affirm the Council of Trent.
I have also been very clear for many decades that while I believe Catholic doctrine is heresy and anyone praying to Mary or the saints should be excommunicated, in the civil realm, we need to follow the example of men like J. Gresham Machen in working with Roman Catholics who share our views on social issues, especially such things as abortion which are covered by the Second Table of the Law.
Personally, I wouldn't have a problem voting for a strongly conservative Roman Catholic, even a member of Opus Dei or a similar traditionalist group. I can support an orthodox Jewish believer running for office for the same reason. We live in a nation that has no official religious covenant, and in fact religious tests are specifically banned by the Constitution for federal office.
That's a very different question from the standards we use to determine church membership.
You are correct, and what you say represents my views also as a Missouri Synod pastor.
Indeed. People have gotten all soft and goopy about these theological positions that mattered a great deal to our progenitors. They are still important.
But because of this goopiness, it is extremely unlikely, almost unthinkable, that a President Bachmann would take any action in that role which would be deleterious to Catholics. I cannot think of a single area where it would come into play.