SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Folded into the Rev. Frank Page's wallet is a yellow scrap of paper with the date and time he is to speak with yet another Republican candidate for the White House.
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(Photo: AP / Sara D. Davis, File)Frank Page smiles after winning the presidency for the Southern Baptist Convention in this June 13, 2006 file photo in Greensboro, N.C. Folded into the Rev. Frank Page's wallet is a yellow scrap of paper with the date and time he is to speak with yet another Republican presidential candidate for the White House. He is president of the 16.3 million-strong Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps the largest single bloc of evangelical voters.
He already has visited one GOP front-runner over breakfast at a country club and met another at the headquarters of a car dealership in his home state.
The South Carolina pastor seems taken aback by the attention, but he shouldn't be: He leads a large congregation in a state with an early primary and is president of the 16.3 million-strong Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps the largest single bloc of evangelical voters and a must-have Republican constituency.
Page, in an interview at his denomination's annual meeting here last week, said he offers his thoughts about salvation to candidates but never an endorsement. And he talks to Democrats, too. He sees the political courtship as a duty: The nation's leaders need to hear a Christian viewpoint, he believes.
But some Southern Baptists would rather stay out of politics altogether. A small but vocal number of pastors believe the denomination is too cozy with Republicans and too political in general. By flirting with the line separating good citizenship and a grab for power, they say, a denomination already experiencing flat membership risks alienating more people.
Others contend such talk might inspire Southern Baptists to retreat from the public square and cede ground on urgent social issues such as abortion.
If anything, the debate is likely to become even more magnified in coming months because no one Republican candidate has captured the conservative evangelical imagination — and all of them are trying.
"Most younger Southern Baptist leaders would strongly affirm good citizenship and voting and involvement in the political process," said Marty Duren, 43, a Georgia pastor. "But they don't confound personal involvement with organizing for political power, which we saw in organizations like the Moral Majority."
Duren also cited national Southern Baptist leaders who joined politicians at "Justice Sunday" events promoting conservative judicial appointments in 2005 and 2006.
So far, such views are in the minority. In San Antonio, Duren proposed an anti-partisanship resolution urging convention leaders "to exercise great restraint when speaking on behalf of Southern Baptists so as not to intermingle their personal political persuasions with their chief responsibility to represent Jesus Christ and this convention."
The resolution that was ultimately adopted, "On Pastors, Culture, and Civic Duty," did not mention partisanship. Instead, it suggested pastors follow the late Jerry Falwell's lead by speaking out on burning moral issues and promote "informed and active Christian citizenship."
"The worst thing that can happen is for people of faith to say, 'You know, that's really not our arena, we're just going to abandon it to the secularists,'" said the Rev. Jerry Sutton of Nashville, Tenn., whose church hosted the second Justice Sunday assembly.
Southern Baptists have been solidly Republican since the emergence of the anti-abortion movement, the denomination's "conservative resurgence" of the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and there is no indication of that wavering. Continue >>
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Comments
I think that pastors should never discuss politics in Church or in public. They can say how abortion is murder, or how war is wrong, but never discuss politics or a particular candidate. Never!!