McCain: The Johnny-Come-Lately Baptist
WashPost blog on faith
This week’s faithiness award goes to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who recently declared himself a Baptist, instead of the Episcopalian he has been all his life, while trolling for votes in heavily Baptist South Carolina. Do you suppose McCain’s dismissal of his lifelong Episcopal background was influenced by political considerations?
Asked how his Episcopal faith affected his decision-making, McCain replied, “It plays a role in my life. By the way, I’m not Episcopalian. I’m Baptist.” McCain was baptized an Episcopalian, and he attended the exclusive private Episcopal High School in Alexandria, VA. But it seems that he and his family attend services at the North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona. Although McCain’s wife and children have been baptized Baptists (nice alliteration), McCain chose not to be “reborn” as a Baptist. And re-baptism, regardless of what denomination you were originally baptized in, is apparently something that separates the true Baptist from a political Johnny-Come-Lately Baptist (at least in the more conservative Southern Baptist Convention, the largest single religious denomination in the United States).
One wonders whether McCain, campaigning in Massachusetts, would declare himself a Roman Catholic or a secularist, since both groups (sometimes overlapping in their views about political issues) hold sway in what was once a Puritan theocracy.
I suspect that McCain, in declaring himself a down-home Baptist, is really trying to distance himself from “the elites.” Episcopalianism and Unitarianism, to name just two Protestant denominations that are generally considered on the liberal side of the divide in American religion, have long been associated with intellectualism and high economic and social status. And what what red-blooded American candidate would want to be associated with intellectualism, even if it comes in a religious form?
(Continued here.)
This week’s faithiness award goes to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who recently declared himself a Baptist, instead of the Episcopalian he has been all his life, while trolling for votes in heavily Baptist South Carolina. Do you suppose McCain’s dismissal of his lifelong Episcopal background was influenced by political considerations?
Asked how his Episcopal faith affected his decision-making, McCain replied, “It plays a role in my life. By the way, I’m not Episcopalian. I’m Baptist.” McCain was baptized an Episcopalian, and he attended the exclusive private Episcopal High School in Alexandria, VA. But it seems that he and his family attend services at the North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona. Although McCain’s wife and children have been baptized Baptists (nice alliteration), McCain chose not to be “reborn” as a Baptist. And re-baptism, regardless of what denomination you were originally baptized in, is apparently something that separates the true Baptist from a political Johnny-Come-Lately Baptist (at least in the more conservative Southern Baptist Convention, the largest single religious denomination in the United States).
One wonders whether McCain, campaigning in Massachusetts, would declare himself a Roman Catholic or a secularist, since both groups (sometimes overlapping in their views about political issues) hold sway in what was once a Puritan theocracy.
I suspect that McCain, in declaring himself a down-home Baptist, is really trying to distance himself from “the elites.” Episcopalianism and Unitarianism, to name just two Protestant denominations that are generally considered on the liberal side of the divide in American religion, have long been associated with intellectualism and high economic and social status. And what what red-blooded American candidate would want to be associated with intellectualism, even if it comes in a religious form?
(Continued here.)
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