It was bound to happen. Former Southern Baptist pastor and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, running second in polls for the GOP presidential nomination, is being snubbed by more than a few Southern Baptist leaders because, in part, they don’t think he was vocal enough during the denomination’s “conservative resurgence” during the last two decades.
So we have come to the point where a serious candidate for the Oval Office is being vetted by his track record in a denominational fight. If they were alive to see this, the framers of the Constitution would be chewing on their powdered wigs.
For his part, Huckabee is bemoaning the “chilling effect” of being abandoned by “my own,” perhaps assuming too much loyalty based on church ties.
Then there’s the question of Mitt Romney’s religion, which led him to give a speech two weeks ago to assure voters he would not turn the White House into a Mormon extension office, much as John F. Kennedy aimed to defuse worries about his Roman Catholicism in 1960.
And Democratic candidates – notably Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – now are expected to talk freely about their faith, their prayer lives, their church involvement.
It’s no wonder that the role of religion in the presidential campaign has been named one of the top religion stories of 2007. Impressive, considering that 2008 hasn’t even begun and the first votes haven’t been cast.
Each December, the Religion Newswriters Association polls its active members on the top 10 religion news stories of the year, and this year politics took the top two slots: the dilemma facing evangelical voters about possible Republican presidential candidates, followed by the efforts of leading Democratic candidates to woo faith-based voters.
RNA is only one list, however. (Creating year-end lists is a popular hobby, like college football rankings.) Christianity Today, a leading monthly magazine for evangelical Christians, produces one, and this year so did Time magazine.
In addition to the religion-and-presidential-race story, all three also included, in different order, the disputes over gays and lesbians that threaten to split the worldwide Anglican Communion, with the argument centered on the United States’ Episcopal Church; the passing of several American church leaders, particularly Jerry Falwell; and the growth of environmental concerns, particularly global warming, among religious groups.
None of the lists agreed on the year’s top story, however. At the top of Time’s list was the August publication, a decade after her death, of Mother Teresa’s private letters and papers, including the revelation that she did not feel the presence of God for most of the last half of her life.
Resurgent Taliban forces in Afghanistan kidnapped 23 South Korean missionaries and murdered two of them before negotiations could be concluded: this was the year’s top religion story, according to Christianity Today.
Here are the rest of RNA’s top religion stories for 2007:
3. The role of gays and lesbians in clergy continues as a deeply dividing issue.
4. Global warming rises in importance among religious groups.
5. Illegal immigration is debated by religious leaders and groups on both sides of the issue.
6. Thousands of Buddhist monks lead pro-democracy protest in Myanmar, which is brutally crushed after a week.
7. Some conservative U.S. Episcopalians realign with Anglican bishops in Africa and elsewhere in the global South, initiating legal disputes about church property ownership.
8. The Supreme Court, by 5-4 votes, rules on the conservative side in three major cases with religious implications: upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions, allowing schools to establish some limits on students’free speech, and denying a challenge to the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.
9. Death takes evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, D. James Kennedy, as well as Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, and Jim Bakker’s ex-wife, Tammy Faye Messner. Other deaths include Gilbert Patterson, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, and Bible scholar Bruce Metzger.
10. The cost of priestly sex-abuse to the Roman Catholic Church in the United States surpasses $2.1 billion, with a record $660 million settlement involving the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 29 Dec 2007.
