This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama’s surprise announcement yesterday that he now supports marriage equality for same-sex couples brought great joy to two very different groups of people. The first were same-sex couples and LGBT folk, as well as Democrats who no longer have to apologize for a president whose position is still “evolving.” The second group is a little less obvious: the cultural crusaders of the Right, who can now make a stronger argument that social issues should be a focus of the Republicans’ campaign strategy.
Mitt Romney’s campaign strategists are caught in between, left with a strategic dilemma. Using the issue of same-sex marriage to try to mess with Obama’s electorate base–blacks and Hispanics–will be incredibly tempting. But a strident anti-gay marriage campaign, while it may excite conservative interest groups, distracts from Romney’s preferred focus on the economy–and poses a major risk of alienating swing voters and independents.
Republicans can’t ignore that the conservative point of view on same-sex marriage is clearly, if slowly, losing ground in the general electorate. Polls have consistently shown support for marriage equality achieving plurality if not majority support during the last couple of years. Typical was a Gallup survey last week that showed 50 percent of Americans supporting legalized gay marriage, with just 48 percent opposing it. Just as important, the shrinking percentage of Americans opposing gay marriage is increasingly concentrated in the GOP, which reduces their value as swing voters. The same Gallup poll showed self-identified independents supporting gay marriage by a 57-40 margin, far closer to the Democrats’ 65-34 division than to the Republicans’ 22-to-74 split.
And voter intensity on this topic has shifted even more dramatically. According to NBC-Wall Street Journal survey data, in 2004–the last presidential year when this topic was thought to have mattered–opponents of gay marriage enjoyed a greater than two-to-one margin over supporters (62-30). But fully 51 percent of Americans strongly opposed gay marriage, while only 18 percent strongly supported it. As of March 2012, strong supporters of marriage equality (32 percent) have caught up and even passed strong opponents (31 percent).
That’s the demographic reality Obama recognized, preempting what was beginning to look like a real problem for him this summer. There was a growing movement–endorsed already by eleven state party chairs–to place support for marriage equality in the 2012 Democratic platform. Given the president’s total control of the platform process, he would eventually have had to embrace it or squelch it; there’s not much of a middle ground any more on the basic proposition of marriage equality.
Despite all the deterrents for waging an anti-gay marriage campaign, Republicans are sure to fixate on how this will affect two crucial factions of the Democratic voting base: African-Americans and Hispanics. The most recent Pew survey on the subject showed African-Americans opposing gay marriage by a 49-39 margin. That’s a considerable improvement in support for marriage equality from the 63-26 margin of opposition Pew found in 2008, but given the increasingly heavy support of white Democrats for marriage equality, still a pretty striking anomaly. And a 2011 Pew poll suggested that Hispanic Catholics remain more likely to oppose gay marriage than white Catholics. Hispanic Protestants tend to be more conservative on nearly all issues, but as (usually) evangelicals, they are especially likely to oppose gay marriage. Given the GOP’s general problem with Hispanics–due to a recent bender on immigration policy, not to mention hostility to a social safety net–it will be tempting for them to try to make this a wedge issue.
Their model may be Ohio in 2004, when an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative and the Bush campaign’s intensive outreach effort to African-American churches may have made a crucial difference in the state that decided the presidential election. But following that strategy is unlikely to pay off as easily this year. That’s because there won’t be as many gay marriage initiatives on state ballots in November this year as in many recent cycles, and they’ll largely be in states that Obama is certain to carry (Maine, Minnesota, Washington, and Maryland).
So any effort to use the issue will have to involve more overt partisan politicking, which some conservative evangelical ministers–and particularly African-American ministers loath to openly oppose the first African-American president–will be reluctant to embrace. Republicans could deploy targeted, under-the-radar appeals on same-sex marriage, but it will be tricky to do so without letting the passions associated with this and other cultural issues get out of hand, creating a distraction at best and a backlash at worst. Perhaps Republicans would have been better off in the end had Obama “evolved” a bit more slowly.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic. The Update at the end is original, not cross-posted.
In 2008, nobody much cared what Ron Paul wanted: He was dismissed as a fringe candidate, someone defined by the decades he spent losing 434-to-one votes in the House and refusing to endorse his party’s presidential candidate. In this presidential cycle, however, questions about Paul’s intentions have risen, precisely because his performance has begun to resemble that of a conventional politician who can compete if not win. Indeed, it’s a sign of Ron Paul’s greatly enhanced influence that Republicans are still asking, this far into the primary season: What does the man want?
The primary season has consistently furnished evidence of Paul’s outsized influence. Of course, Paul has not won a single caucus or primary so far this year. But as Micah Cohen explained in early April, he more than doubled his vote as compared to 2008, despite spending less money. He attracted well over a million votes–about 10 percent of the aggregate vote in primaries and 20 percent in caucuses. Even as Rick Santorum and (finally) Newt Gingrich dropped out of the race, Paul has persisted.
And his intensely loyal supporters have dominated delegate selection processes in a number of states–including Iowa, Massachusetts, Colorado, Louisiana and Minnesota–that earlier held primaries or “beauty contest” straw polls. Most shockingly, thanks to their big wins in district conventions, Paulites could make up a majority of delegates from Mitt Romney’s home state of Massachusetts. Though these delegates will be pledged to vote for Mitt, they can support Paul on procedural votes–and if he wishes, help him obtain the five-state endorsement he needs to have his name placed into nomination. Paul could also win a majority of the actual delegate votes in Iowa, where delegates are not bound by the January caucus in which Paul finished third. A Paulite was recently elected state party chairman there, and his comrades are almost certain to control a majority of the state party committee.
It is increasingly clear, then, that the Paul campaign will achieve its goal of being visibly represented at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. While a full-on platform fight is unlikely (and anachronistic), Paul’s supporters have the potential to cause quite a commotion. The Romney campaign and the RNC, of course, would prefer to ensure that things stay quiet. And since Paul’s supporters are intensely loyal to their hero, he’s in a position to bargain for their good behavior in Tampa. Which brings us back to the original question: What does he want?
The underlying reality is that Dr. Paul and his fanbase have already won what they most craved from Republicans: respect. I don’t just mean his hard-earned inclusion in candidate debates, or the civil treatment he’s received from his rivals. In a very real sense, on domestic issues at least, the GOP has moved dramatically in Paul’s direction since 2008. That’s most apparent in discussions of monetary policy. While none of Paul’s rivals in the presidential contest embraced a gold standard or abolition of the Fed, the alleged perils of monetary inflation have been emphasized far more than one might expect in the midst of a recession. As National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru noted in February:

Many Republicans tell pollsters that they will not vote for Paul because of his foreign-policy views. Nobody says that his monetary views are a deal breaker; no pollster even bothers to ask. There is no organized opposition to Paulite views on money within the Republican party or conservative movement, and the people who hold those views hold them intensely.

More fundamentally, the entire edifice of “constitutional conservatism” that has become the preferred signifier for economic ideology within and beyond the Tea Party is pretty much boilerplate Paulism, reflecting his belief that much of twentieth-century governing practice in the United States represented an illegitimate expansion of federal power. The obdurate resistance to non-enumerated federal powers that made Paul, according to a detailed analysis by University of Georgia political scientist Keith Poole, the single most conservative member of Congress to serve between 1937 and 2002, is now firmly within the GOP mainstream.
But as Ponnuru indicated, there is one policy area where Paul’s views are still well outside his party’s mainstream: his staunch anti-interventionist philosophy and hardcore positions on civil liberties. It is probably fortunate for Paul that foreign policy was a relatively minor issue in the 2012 GOP nominating contest. But when it did come up, Paul sounded notes that would have been viewed as far-left had they been articulated in a Democratic candidate debate. In a party where “American exceptionalism” is a constant theme, the “threat” of Islamism abroad and at home is considered urgent, and unconditional support for Israel is axiomatic, Paul expressed empathy for the Iranian regime and apologetic regret for past meddling in Iranian domestic politics.
Attitudes like that are rarely expressed by GOP politicians–except by Paul’s son, Rand, the junior senator from Kentucky. In a move that would make his father proud, Rand Paul recently blocked a unanimous consent agreement on a resolution to ratchet up economic sanctions on Iran and Syria, demanding explicit assurances that it would not be used to justify a military intervention. But Rand Paul bears few of the scars of decades of ideological battle earned by his father. He enjoys a closer relationship with the GOP establishment in the Senate and elsewhere; according to some reports, he is already plotting a presidential candidacy of his own, if not in 2016 then in 2020. If anyone could bring anti-interventionist foreign policy into the mainstream of the GOP, it’s Rand.
This suggests a simple answer to what Ron Paul wants: He is ready, like Moses, to withdraw from the battleground having never entered the Promised Land, entrusting that task to his Joshua, his son. And whatever the doctor can do to make his son an accepted voice for a respected point of view on foreign policy–whether it’s securing a convention speech, a platform concession, or just a place at the table in hypothetical Romney administration deliberations–he will cash his last gold coins to make it happen.
UPDATE: Before the ink was dry on this report, Paulites pulled off coups at state conventions in Maine and Nevada, winning most of the delegate slots, though in Nevada, as in Massachusetts, delegates will have to actually vote in accordance with Romney’s earlier victories.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it is part of a symposium on “Obama and Populism.” Note also the additional contributions to the symposium from TDS Co-Editors Ruy Teixeira and William Galston.
The cool, professorial Barack Obama may not be the most natural politician to espouse a populist message. And being the incumbent doesn’t help: Rhetoric that makes voters feel more aggrieved about their current condition isn’t likely to win him any votes. But Obama can still run on a populist platform. In fact, he has to. Not because it’s the best way to argue for his agenda–because it’s the best way to bash his opponent, Mitt Romney.
It’s fitting that most of the discussions of the advantages and pitfalls of populism for Obama are focused on rhetoric. On a policy level, a sitting president has a relatively limited window for populist agenda items. Obama has supported a tax surcharge on the very wealthy, tax penalties on companies outsourcing jobs, greater regulation of banks and insurance companies–these all command strong popular support in the general electorate. But there are some populist positions that Obama simply can’t assume without the kind of reversal of positions that a vulnerable incumbent is not about to undertake. Obama is not going to say TARP (or his implementation of it) was a mistake; that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is a corporate stooge; that economic globalization needs to be resisted by every possible means; or that private health insurance ought to be abolished.
But if by “going populist” one means criticizing the excessive power of wealthy private interests in the economy, society, and politics–and the Republican policies designed to defend or increase it–then the President has significantly more latitude, which he clearly has signaled his willingness to use. How far can he credibly go in the direction of unrestrained rhetorical populism? In his TNR essay on this subject yesterday, Geoffrey Kabaservice argued that Obama would be constrained by his personality: a populist tone, he suggested, is alien to the persona of a President who is “nobody’s idea of ‘just folks.'” But American history has shown that populist rhetoric doesn’t have to come from the heartland. Franklin Roosevelt was nobody’s idea of “just folks” either; that didn’t keep him from inveighing against economic royalists, or from quoting his equally patrician relative Theodore Roosevelt in denouncing “malefactors of great wealth.”
Kabaservice associates Obama with John F. Kennedy’s “cool,” but an identically privileged background did not prevent JFK’s two brothers from striking populist notes. On one occasion in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was speaking to a medical school audience about the need for better health care for the poor, and one of the future physicians asked him sarcastically where he expected to get the money for such social luxuries; without hesitation Kennedy responded, “From you.” As RFK showed, it’s possible to combine populist heat with the progressive light of a “common national purpose” message.
In fact, a more populist tone is not only possible for Obama, it’s essential. While voters may hold him primarily responsible for the economy, they will judge his performance based on their sense of the trouble he inherited from Bush and the resistance he’s facing from Bush’s party. That means, to use the all-purpose terms devised by Democratic wordsmith Bob Shrum, Obama has to convince the electorate that he’s been “fighting for you” and is “on your side” against the policies of a party beholden to sinister rent-seeking corporate actors.
Most importantly, Obama badly needs to make sure this is a “choice election,” and not a referendum on Obama’s first term. That means he needs to run on Mitt Romney’s flaws, and not only on his own accomplishments. And because of Romney’s own background and economic agenda, a populist message is the best way to do that. Romney is running almost entirely on his reputation as a corporate wizard; his economic policy platform is about liberating “job creators” from taxes and oversight; and he has embraced the Ryan Budget, a domestic policy blueprint that aims at a government-engineered redistribution of resources from the bottom to the top of the income ladder. If Obama does not draw attention to the obvious class nature of Romney’s background, agenda, allies, and beneficiaries, then he is in danger of letting Romney get away with the suggestion that he’s simply offering an alternative path to full economic recovery–not a path for the wealthy to acquire more wealth.
For Obama to represent the national interest and the welfare of the broad middle-class, as those fearing a populist approach so often suggest, he’s going to have to establish that Mitt Romney is a creature of moneyed special interests. And like it or not, that means Obama must wage rhetorical battle against America’s elite. That’s not to say that the President will have to model himself on William Jennings Bryan; for the purposes of this election, RFK would suffice.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When Charles Colson died last weekend, he was best known as the Watergate felon turned prison minister. But Colson, a constant presence in Christian Right circles for over two decades, had perhaps his greatest impact in another sphere of American life: expanding evangelical-Catholic cooperation in the fight against legalized abortion into a broader political alliance.
For signs of his success, look at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ latest manifesto, published just last month. Titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the statement embraces the long-standing conservative evangelical campaign against secularism in the courts and in the Obama administration. To protest the alleged threat to religious liberty, the document announced a “fortnight of freedom” series to occur in churches across the country this summer–coinciding with the quickening of the 2012 general election.
The Catholic document, which adopts culture-war memes long associated with the Christian Right, clearly reflects Colson’s long-standing campaign to identify religious freedom with the right of churches and church institutions to defy laws and polices they find repugnant. The statement even included a prominent shout-out to a similar, if more sharply worded, manifesto issued by Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT)–a loose alliance of thinkers and actors founded in 1994 by none other than Colson and his Catholic comrade, Richard John Neuhaus. (Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and former Lutheran minister, is responsible for creating much of the basic vocabulary of the more cerebral elements of the Christian Right in his 1984 book The Naked Public Square.)
When ECT issued its first manifesto, it was a highly controversial exercise that attracted considerable criticism from both evangelicals and Catholics. ECT proclaimed that the moral and political emergency facing conservative Christians trumped their vast theological differences–not to mention centuries of conflict, persecution, and vituperation. And while ECT’s struggle to achieve Catholic-evangelical convergence on doctrinal issues had at best a mixed record, the more fundamental claim that the most urgent matter for today’s Christians is common opposition to “secularist” policies has made astonishing strides, as witnessed by the Bishops’ statement.
But even as conservative Catholics and evangelicals agree to subjugate their continued differences in doctrine, worship, and non-cultural political traditions to a unified front against the enemy of moral relativism, the often-ignored third force in American Christianity–mainline Protestants–have been steadily overcoming precisely those doctrinal barriers that have long divided them from Rome. We may be on the brink of a religious realignment, whereby the issues on which Christians argued, fought, killed, and persecuted each other (and others) since the sixteenth century are giving way to a different source of division: the culture wars.
The signs of this realignment are most visible in politics. A highly traditionalist Catholic, Rick Santorum, who belongs to a parish where the Latin Mass is still celebrated, became the preferred presidential candidate of conservative evangelicals. Over the course of the primary campaign, it became clear that he shares the common conservative evangelical view that mainline Protestants are largely apostates, barely deserving inclusion in Christianity.
Yet the single most notable trend in mainline American Protestantism in recent decades has been the adoption of liturgical practices associated with Catholicism, such as frequent communion and observance of liturgical seasons, particularly since Rome reformed its own liturgy during and after the Second Vatican Council Catholics and most mainline Protestants have long since adopted a common “lectionary” of scripture readings for use during worship services throughout the year. At the same time, the radical theological experiments that were once so fashionable in liberal Protestant circles have been subsiding; mainliners are far more likely to recite the historic Nicene or Apostle’s creeds during worship than are evangelicals. In other words, a growing number of mainline Protestants now worship much like Catholics. And on non-cultural issues, from social justice to anti-war protests, Catholic and mainline Protestant cooperation–particularly at the local level–has become a familiar part of the civic landscape. This tradition, in fact, is continuing currently in the combined criticism of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal by both mainline Protestants and Catholic Bishops.
For anyone familiar with the history of intra-Christian conflict, the mainline-Catholic convergence on doctrine and worship is jarring. I recently attended a Sunday service at a mainline Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) congregation in Atlanta where the Lord’s Supper was referred to as a “sacrifice.” This would have been startling not only to that denomination’s nineteenth century founders, but to the Protestant Reformers themselves, who abandoned regular communion precisely because of its treatment by the medieval Church as a sacrifice instead of as a testament of faith.
The oddity of the ever-strengthening conservative Catholic-evangelical alliance against the “modernist” mainliners on cultural issues, if nothing else, is most evident in the battles within the mainline denominations over acceptance of homosexuality among lay people and clergy. More often than not, the evangelicals who accuse denominational leaders of abandoning “orthodoxy” in moral teaching are most avid to promote innovation in styles of worship. As an Episcopal priest in Maryland ruefully told me of conservative dissidents in his parish during the 1990s: “These people come to church with a Christian Coalition tract in one hand and a ‘praise hymnal’ in the other.” In the broader fight over ordination of LGBT priests and bishops that has shaken the Anglican communion during the last decade, it’s the evangelicals indifferent or hostile to traditional worship who are leading the battle for “traditional” moral views, while the liturgically conservative Anglo-Catholic wing has generally been indifferent or supportive towards the advent of openly gay clergy.
All these cross-cutting trends and counter-trends in American (and global) Christianity call into question any glib arrangement of denominations, movements, or individuals as conservative or liberal, traditionalist or modernist. Neuhaus and Colson certainly had little doubt that what brought them together as culture-warriors was more important than any of the divergent ways their two Christian traditions have developed doctrinally in two millennia.
And for now, at least, the most powerful leaders among conservative evangelicals seem to agree with Colson. It’s too early to conclude that Neuhaus’s argument has won over the U.S. Catholic hierarchy for good–much less the many millions of Catholic lay people, priests and religious who have not enlisted in the culture wars. But if the recent alarms raised by the Bishops on “religious freedom”–complemented by the Vatican’s crackdown on non-compliant American nuns–are any indication, that’s the direction they seem to be headed. If so, they will stand against the mainline Protestants who increasingly find common ground with them at the altar and in the pews, if not on the cultural and political barricades.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Of all the issues on which Mitt Romney will be tempted to execute an “Etch-a-Sketch” moment as he heads into the general election, immigration is the most pressing. Remember, on immigration Romney didn’t just rely on his super PAC to slur his opponents; he identified himself robustly with the nativist strain in the GOP. This worked out fine in the primaries: It helped him snuff the existential threat of Rick Perry’s candidacy, and provided additional fodder for his team’s crucial attack on Newt Gingrich after the South Carolina primary. The general election, though, is a different proposition. With the Hispanic community an increasingly large part of the electorate, Romney will need to campaign for at least some part of the Hispanic vote, and his rhetoric in the past few months doesn’t leave him with many options to do so.
Romney himself recently acknowledged his need for Hispanic voters to an elite GOP donor audience in Florida:

Predicting that immigration would become a much larger issue in the fall campaign, Romney told his audience, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party,” warning that recent polling showing Hispanics breaking in huge percentages for President Obama “spells doom for us.”

But as eager as Romney is to pivot, the vocal positions he took earlier in this campaign will make it very hard for him to do so. There are two lines it will be difficult for Romney to cross without inviting fresh charges of flip-flopping: his opposition to “amnesty,” which largely rules out any comprehensive immigration reform proposal that includes large-scale legalization; and his loud embrace of “self-deportation” of undocumented workers. This latter position, which seemed relatively mild in the context of GOP primaries where many voters favored forced deportation, now identifies Romney with the various state efforts inspired by Arizona’s SB 1070, which are designed to make life very difficult for illegal immigrants–and which tend to make life difficult for Hispanics generally. (Indeed, Romney has repeatedly endorsed SB 1070, calling it a national model, even as it receives a new burst of publicity as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments against it this week.)
Romney has nonetheless begun moderating his hard-line positions, with somewhat muddled results. His staff is now suggesting that Mitt’s endorsement of SB 1070 was partial, mainly based on the law’s features forcing employers to verify the documentation of workers. And there are reports that he’s no longer treating Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, one of the drafters of the Arizona law, as his principal advisor on immigration issues. Romney has also expressed interest in the idea of a “Republican version” of the DREAM Act, though he’s been hesitant to endorse Marco Rubio’s proposal to give undocumented people temporary legal status if they go to college or enter the military, presumably because that might discourage “self-deportation.”
Introducing these kinds of nuances into Romney’s immigration positions may not elicit a backlash, but it’s questionable whether it’s enough to win over skeptical Hispanics. Yet any explicit flip-flop by Romney on immigration will reinforce his image as a calculating prevaricator. That will not only hamper his ability to establish credibility among Hispanics, it will damage his appeal to swing voters. He also has to be sure to protect his right flank, particularly since the white independent voters he desperately needs tend to harbor some nativist sentiments. (Its unclear if such latent xenophobia will be affected by news that the flow of undocumented workers entering the country has largely ended and net migration from Mexico has officially reached zero.)
Of course, many pundits think Mitt just needs to put someone with a Spanish surname on the ticket to attract Hispanic voters. But the two most likely candidates, Marco Rubio and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, both have plenty of other flaws (the first-term governor Martinez raises the specter of Sarah Palin; a recent PPP poll shows Rubio not helping Romney even among Florida Hispanics as a running-mate.) In any case, both Rubio and Martinez have repeatedly said they are not interested in joining the ticket.
Romney has previously said that Hispanics care more about the economy than about immigration policy. With his stance on immigration, he better hope that’s true–and that he can get a large enough minority of that vote to win battleground states. And if all else fails, I suppose, he always has the nuclear option: arguing that the polygamous colony his great-grandfather founded south of the border makes him a “Mexican-American.” That’s sure to go over well.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When Dallas First Baptist Church pastor Robert Jeffress endorsed Mitt Romney this week, it raised some eyebrows. Jeffress, after all, was the evangelical leader who roiled last year’s Value Voters Summit by casually telling reporters that Mitt Romney was “not a Christian,” but instead a member of the Mormon “cult.” His endorsement should serve as a warning to any Democrats who expect that evangelical distaste for Mormonism will cost Mitt Romney a significant number of votes. Most conservative evangelical political activists, like Jeffress, have long since subordinated any theological concerns about political leaders to a cultural agenda where all are welcome allies.
There’s nothing mysterious about this phenomenon, and it doesn’t reflect dishonesty, either. Jeffress himself explained his endorsement of Romney in pretty clear terms:

Given the choice between a Christian like Barack Obama who embraces very unbiblical principles like abortion and a Mormon like Mitt Romney who supports biblical values like the sanctity of life and marriage, I think there’s a good biblical case for voting for Mitt Romney.

In other words, so long as a candidate is on the same page as the Christian Right on same-sex marriage and abortion– and, increasingly, contraception–his understanding of the metaphysical nature of the universe isn’t a deal-breaker. Mormons are as welcome in the fight against encroaching secularism as anyone else.
The same principle guided the remarkable rapprochement between conservative evangelicals and “traditionalist” Catholics in recent decades. When the theocon Catholic theoretician Richard John Neuhaus and evangelical celebrity Charles Colson formed Catholics and Evangelicals Together (CET) in 1994, it was perceived as a quasi-revolutionary development. It was particularly controversial among Catholics who felt the group’s efforts to move from tactical political cooperation on issues like abortion to theological accommodation went too far. That controversy now seems quaint. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ recently released “Statement on Religious Liberty” went out of its way to endorse a recent manifesto by CET, published in the late Father Neuhaus’s magazine First Things. The Bishops’ statement echoes conservative evangelicals in demanding a high-profile campaign against the Obama administration’s so-called attacks on religious liberty–specifically, the contraception coverage mandate and recent judicial decisions that deny federal funds to religious organizations unwilling to comply with anti-discrimination laws.
To be sure, there are still cross-confessional tensions on the Right. While most conservative evangelical leaders are entirely comfortable with laissez-faire capitalism and have happily participated in the Tea Party Movement, many if not most traditionalist Catholics–along with the Church hierarchy–adhere to a social teaching tradition that inspires

of the Ryan budget But the same Bishops who have chastised Ryan have this week cracked down on American nuns for elevating social justice concerns over “the church’s biblical view on family life and human sexuality.”
And seen from this perspective, Romney’s Mormon faith is as much a positive factor as a negative one. Indeed, another prominent evangelical critic, the homophobic American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, has said repeatedly that his biggest problem with Romney is that “he’s not Mormon enough”–meaning, he has been insufficiently faithful to LDS teachings on abortion and homosexuality.
It’s still possible that the unfamiliar nature of Mormon doctrine may have a subtle effect on evangelical enthusiasm for Mitt. But any evangelical distrust of Mormon theology pales beside the evangelical distrust of mainstream Protestantism–which happens to be the strand of Christianity that Barack Obama belongs to. This attitude can be seen in Rick Santorum’s dismissal of mainline U.S. Protestants as “gone from the world of Christianity”–a comment from 2008 that came to light during the heat of this year’s primary season. While Santorum’s statement was widely criticized, it’s a broadly held, even axiomatic, view for many conservative evangelicals and Catholics. Indeed, conservative minorities in the mainline denominations (most notably Episcopalians) have become accustomed to accusing mainline leaders of heresy and apostasy.
Sure, conservative Christians would have preferred a candidate with a less complicated and controversial belief system than Mitt Romney’s. But as Bryan Fischer indicated, their doubts about Romney probably owe more to the conservative anxiety about his slipperiness than to any particular concerns about the LDS. And in the end, as Jeffress stated plainly, the only religious test that matters is whether you support the “Biblical values” of hostility to feminists, gays, and liberal Protestants like the president.