Given that he worked with Jerry Falwell to create the Moral Majority a quarter-century ago, conservative commentator Cal Thomas, who remains an outspoken evangelical, would seem to be an unlikely voice on making the presidential election more secular.<\/p>\n
And yet, the far-right Republican commentator did just that in his most recent column<\/a>, insisting that candidates’ faith traditions are utterly irrelevant — and the political world should stop pretending otherwise. (via AU<\/a>)<\/p>\n In the wake of Mitt Romney’s speech last week on religion in America, Thomas stated his case for ignoring spiritual qualifications for any secular job.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, a curiosity called the “Christian Yellow Pages” made the rounds of churches and certain businesses run by evangelicals. It contained names of professions one finds in the regular Yellow Pages — plumbers, taxi drivers, auto mechanics, dry cleaners — except these were owned and operated by certified, God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians. The clear implication was that businesses found in the Christian Yellow Pages would do a better job at a better price than the presumed “heathen” who advertised in the bigger yellow book.<\/p>\n I never saw any data that proved a connection between faith in Jesus and the ability to repair a car at a reasonable cost, so I usually went with the shop that did the best job at the lowest price and didn’t bother to ask if the repairman went to church. […]<\/p>\n This election should be more about competence and less about ideology, or even faith. It shouldn’t matter where — or if — a candidate goes to church, but whether he (or she) can run the country well, according to the principles in which the voter believes. And, if those principles include a person of faith, so much the better. God can be the ultimate check and balance on earthly power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To be sure, Thomas, a Fox News contributor, isn’t exactly moving to the left here. He’s just making the argument that the recent spiritual scrutiny is misguided. While requiring politicians to express belief in Jesus and the Bible, many evangelical voters ignore Christ’s statements about the source of genuine power. They also conveniently forget what Christ said about how they would be regarded and treated by a world that had rejected Him (and still does as the best-selling atheistic works of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins attest). Jesus, in whom Mitt Romney said he believed, warned, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” (John 15:18) and “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also” (John 15:20). Those warnings are not the creed of contemporary evangelicals who think persecution is a negative newspaper editorial or a disparaging remark by a skeptic on a cable TV show. Too many contemporary evangelicals want the blessing without obeying their real commander in chief, who said doing things His way would bring real persecution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wouldn’t make the argument quite that way, but the sentiment is nevertheless appreciated.<\/p>\n Regrettably, Thomas glides past it, but he helped create the political movement that led to these conditions in the first place. That said, it’s refreshing to see him coming around to offer such a sensible approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Given that he worked with Jerry Falwell to create the Moral Majority a quarter-century ago, conservative commentator Cal Thomas, who remains an outspoken evangelical, would seem to be an unlikely voice on making the presidential election more secular. And yet, the far-right Republican commentator did just that in his most recent column, insisting that candidates’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nOf course, Thomas is articulating this, not from a secular perspective, but from an evangelical one.<\/p>\n