Tuesday, December 04, 2007
NPR Last Night
Was amazingly good -- they actually played a tape of Harry Reid rather than some backbencher or some Blue Dog.
But one odd thing came up. They interviewed a conservative preacherman from IA about his opinions of the GOP candidates. Pace those who claim there is a double standard about African-American church-based political activism, the fact is that if any liberal pastor -- black or white -- put things as directly as he put them, her church would have its tax-exempt status yanked by the IRS sooner than you could say "render unto Caesar".
But that's not what caught my attention. The reporter decided, naturally, to harass this preacherman about Mitt Romney's Mormonism. His response was quite honest: essentially, "most conservative protestants don't care, but we pastors have been telling our flocks that Mormonism is wrong -- so how'll we tell our flocks to vote for a Mormon?". My first reaction was ... well, see about about the double standard. But my second reaction was -- how is this a problem for a Christian? Hasn't this pastor actually read what he considers to be his Bible? Does he not understand the parable of the Good Samaritan? Nu? He thinks of Good Samaritan as some turn of phrase and doesn't understand who were the Samaritans?
Nu? How come a Jew, who doesn't believe in those books remembers this whilst a so-called Christian pastor doesn't? Is it objective distance or something more, well, peculiar about those who take the mantel of being the guardians of Christian morality?
But one odd thing came up. They interviewed a conservative preacherman from IA about his opinions of the GOP candidates. Pace those who claim there is a double standard about African-American church-based political activism, the fact is that if any liberal pastor -- black or white -- put things as directly as he put them, her church would have its tax-exempt status yanked by the IRS sooner than you could say "render unto Caesar".
But that's not what caught my attention. The reporter decided, naturally, to harass this preacherman about Mitt Romney's Mormonism. His response was quite honest: essentially, "most conservative protestants don't care, but we pastors have been telling our flocks that Mormonism is wrong -- so how'll we tell our flocks to vote for a Mormon?". My first reaction was ... well, see about about the double standard. But my second reaction was -- how is this a problem for a Christian? Hasn't this pastor actually read what he considers to be his Bible? Does he not understand the parable of the Good Samaritan? Nu? He thinks of Good Samaritan as some turn of phrase and doesn't understand who were the Samaritans?
Nu? How come a Jew, who doesn't believe in those books remembers this whilst a so-called Christian pastor doesn't? Is it objective distance or something more, well, peculiar about those who take the mantel of being the guardians of Christian morality?
# posted by alberich @ 9:40 AM 
