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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.
Yes, I am in. It is simply a Christian Alliance.
Catholic or Evangelical? What is the difference? We both are in this together. But so are the Jews.
Christians, Jews and and some “groups” are all in this battle. Like it or not. The “book” describes those and the enemies.
Christians will not set out the 2012 elections like they did in 2008. We will have a replay of 2010.
A bunch of Traitors to the faith will go Bye Bye. Obozo with them.
If HALF the Catholics or gun owners or conservative women would actually get to the polls and vote, this would happen.
In my mind, anybody who loves freedom should join this movement, even atheists.
They put him in, I guess they can take him out.
political coincidences aside, Protestantism is a denial of Catholicism. Is that "different" enough for you?
Votes reflect what one really believes.
47.8% of the Evangelicals and 11.8% of Catholics affirm the Bible is Literally true. 6.5% of the former and 19.8% of the latter see it as an ancient book of history and legends.
Evangelical Protestants are the most politically conservative Christian tradition. Within each tradition, those with literal views of the Bible are more politically conservative than is their tradition overall. Catholics that are Biblical literalists (11.8%) hold more conservative political views than the Catholic population in general does. The Biblical literalist Catholic is as politically conservative as the Biblical literalist who is Evangelical (47.8%) or Mainline Protestant. (11.2%) American Piety in the 21st Century, Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/33304.pdf
72% of Catholics said that the will of the American people should have more influence than the Bible on US law, as compared to 63% of the general public. Pew Research Center, “Pragmatic Americans Liberal and Conservative on Social Issues,” August 3, 2006, http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/283.pdf (accessed June 24, 2008).
37% of Catholics in the last election were registered as Democrats, 27% Republican, and 31% as Independents. Aggregated Pew Research Surveys, 2007. http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=295#ideology
More: http://www.peacebyjesus.com/RC-Stats_vs._Evang.html
Who is the "They" you are defaming - Catholics or Evangelicals?
Yep, I guess it does. No Pope. And no King but Jesus, God's son. So the dispute is among leadership by men, not about scripture.
Grow up. Join the battle. We are all in this, like it or not.
Catholics are socialists by nature. Interestingly, those opposed to socialism also tend to move away from the concept of centering the entire religion around sin. Socialism thrives in the world due to Catholics.
It is not an evangelical-Catholic alliance. Period.
It’s about Americans voting for the best candidate AVAILABLE. Period.
There are enough attacks on the American people without trying to push a religeous divide on us as well.
And it's almost certainly Catholics.
Ethnics in the Democratic party - Irish, Italian - have been leaning Right for 30 years. The "Reagan Democrats".
But in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008, they reverted to the Democratic party out of fear.
Perhaps understandable. The old Ward bosses undoubtedly came by and said, "see - deese Repugnants is no good. Vote for our guy, even if he is a bit scary".
So they did. But after all that cooing in their ears, the real Obama came out: a thug surrounded by cheap enforcers, bent on intimidation and extortion.
Now the same people have gotten a little taste of what living in the old Soviet Union was like: they don't care what you think. They'll just bully you until you do what they want you too, and that means party time for them on everyone else's dime. Work is not for them...that's for the prole class. Beeg Men don't make things, they take them.
So get a clue. Catholics blessed us with the Kennedy's who brought us mass immigration from the Third World, un-civil rights (anyone non-white outranks a white any day of the week, 'cept if they're Irish illegal immigrants), and a collapse of moral values - Teddy being the poster child for wanton behavior.
So they put these freaks in, they can get a clue and take them out.
Delusional
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Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Your anti-Catholic underwear is showing. And it’s not pretty.
This will degenerate into a Catholic bashing thread in 3....2.....1..
Your count started way too late ....
I never used nor implied a divide. I simply said that Christians, Jews and some others are all in this together.
We have a common enemy who wishes to destroy the finest nation in the world.
I know the title says “alliance”. But that choice of words was not mine.
Islam and Liberalism are two linked cults, simply not compatible with civilization.
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