Tag: Faith and politics

LaHaye and Jenkins take a literal interpretation of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation. They believe the antichrist will surface on the world stage at some point, but neither see Obama in that role. “I’ve gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist,” says novelist Jenkins. “I tell everyone that I don’t think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics.”

It’s a trend that we’ve noted previously as we’ve followed nonconservative evangelical groups and seen reports of this through the Pew Forum, but the Washington Post gave over part of its front page yesterday to put a new face on the changing landscape both for evangelicals and the Republican Party—that of Jonathan Merritt, 25, a Baptist preacher’s son who explains in an interview how he personally has experienced that change.

The Washington Post’s On Faith section would like us to believe that megachurch pastor Rick Warren, who is hosting a presidential debate on issues of faith, is a religious moderate. But it was Warren who wrote Time magazine’s egregious puff piece on Peter Akinola and who supported Henry Orombi’s boycott of the Lambeth Conference. Nice company.

Both Republican and Democratic pew-sitters need moral distance from politicians who place the moral mantel of personal purity or the social gospel or both on their shoulders.

Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the apocalyptic Left Behind series, told Beliefnet that questions from concerned Christians to him about whether Sen. Obama is the antichrist have tripled in the last two weeks, during the period when the ad started running. – Steve Waldman

The Sisters of St. Joseph sponsors a system of 14 hospitals and employs 20,000 workers in three states. SEIU wants to organize in these hospitals. The hospital system and the union have reached an impasse as to the rules for an election. The clash is more than between union and management. It is a clash of theology.

Time let John McCain and Barack Obama to describe their faith. Each used the opportunity to offer a very different take of the issue of the importance of faith in their lives.

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius reportedly sit on top of Barack Obama’s vice presidential short list. What binds these two–aside from being effective Democratic governors of red (or reddish) states–is that they’re both Roman Catholic. But their similarities mask a surprising gulf: Sebelius and Kaine have had markedly different political relationships with the Church.

Set aside the fraught question of when human life begins. The new debate: When does pregnancy begin? The Bush Administration has ignited a furor with a proposed definition of pregnancy that has the effect of classifying some of the most widely used methods of contraception as abortion.

A German church has far exceeded its initial expectations in distributing more than 200,000 black bracelets intended as a symbolic protest against human rights abuses in China during the Olympic Games in Beijing.