The fact she left WELS because she was seeking higher office doesn’t sit well with me.
I can understand the issues it would pose, but if she didn’t believe what the Synod taught, she should have left before now.
The only defense could be that she is a Flake.
It doesn’t sit well with me either, redgolum.
This is now going to be used as a weapon. They are going to start doing this with every Christian body. Someone will dig up the X canon of the Synod of Y against some heretic or other and pressure a candidate to leave their church. We Christians tear each other apart, and Old Scratch’s agenda moves even farther.
I’m ashamed at those oversensitive Catholics who got all upset about this.
If she does’t get the nomination and runs for her seat again, she may have even tougher time as her district is predomately Lutheran...
All Protestant churches have an anti-Catholic subtext...the Anglicans spent their time ripping out statues and altars and killing Catholic clergy and faithful, and Lutheran and Calvinist-descended churches did everything they could in their areas to destroy Catholics. Anti-Catholicism was a standard feature of 19th century America, and even resulted in Catholic deaths at the hands of lynch mobs in places ranging from New York to the South to San Francisco.
There is a certain automatic anti-Catholicism in particular areas (in the South, for example, among both Anglicans and Evangelicals), and as a Catholic living in the South, I do occasionally find it difficult.
But both the Anglican and the Evangelical churches are coming to the realization that they will either be taken over by their liberal or flake wings or they will become more orthodox, and this means dealing with Christian history and the Catholic Church. So this story isn’t over yet. The Protestant churches (including both Anglicans and Lutheran/Calvinist descended churches) are only 500 years old, even younger than Islam, and the Catholic Church is 2000 years old.
That said, modern Protestant churches that come out of this “tradition” may hold to anti-Catholicism as one of their tenets, but it’s only theoretical and in most cases is not what they spend their time talking about. You could probably be a member of one of those churches for a long time without even knowing their theory on Catholics. As a member, you might have a mild cultural aversion to Catholics, but you probably wouldn’t realize that your church had initially regarded them as evil incarnate.
I doubt that Bachmann focused on the anti-Catholicism of her church, but on their faith, so I can see why she would have bailed on the church only after she had had to examine it more closely because she planned to run for office.
I don’t think she’s anti-Catholic or self-serving, and I think this is yet another attempt by liberals to divide us.
I suspect that having a Lutheran, or a former Lutheran, in the White House is preferable to having a muslim there.
Then again, maybe Bachmann’s religious opponents are right; maybe we should wait, not voting, until someone absolutely perfect comes along, someone who appeals to 100% of the American public.
Her church asked her to leave.