Guest commentary: Catholic candidate Rick Santorum is evangelical progress

The Muskegon Chronicle By The Muskegon Chronicle The Muskegon Chronicle
Follow on Twitter
on January 10, 2012 at 3:41 PM

By Noah Feldman

God so loves Barack Obama that He sent His servant, Rick Santorum, to ensure his re-election as U.S. president.

Or so it seemed in the immediate aftermath of the Iowa caucuses. Soon the inevitable slings and arrows will trouble Santorum’s outrageous fortune. But for the moment, the former Pennsylvania senator has emerged as the candidate of the evangelicals just in time for a frontloaded primaries schedule heading fast into South Carolina, where the values voters stopped John McCain in 2000. And for the moment, Santorum is the person standing between Mitt Romney and the Republican nomination.

Why are religious conservatives sour on Romney? It is of course plausible that they distrust the former Massachusetts governor’s core conservatism. Perhaps they object to his elite credentials as the son of a corporate executive-turned governor who is himself a corporate executive-turned governor. Or maybe they think that a multimillionaire investor who finished near the top of his class at Harvard Business School is unqualified to lead the country in the current economic crisis.

But it is hard to escape the conclusion that many pro- Santorum caucus-goers in Iowa were hung up on Romney’s Mormonism. In 2008, Romney got 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, almost exactly the same as he did this time around. Mike Huckabee -- or, rather, the Rev. Mike Huckabee -- got just over 34 percent four years ago. If you add up Santorum’s 24.5 percent with the votes won Tuesday by evangelicals Michele Bachmann (5 percent) and Rick Perry (10 percent), you could probably account for all of Huckabee’s 2008 supporters and then some.

It is, sadly, not surprising that there is still prejudice against members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The oppression of Mormons has a special place in U.S. political history. No other religion has ever found itself essentially outlawed, as Mormonism was in the 19th century when Congress made it a crime to belong to any organization that advocated plural marriage. And from a theological standpoint, many evangelical Christians refuse to recognize Mormonism even as a branch of Christianity.

But what is remarkable -- partly because almost no one has remarked upon it -- is the evangelicals’ embrace of someone who isn’t himself a Protestant evangelical at all. Santorum, in case you hadn’t noticed, is Catholic.

Watching Santorum’s Iowa advertisements, this crucial fact would have been easy to miss. The sweater-vests, being ecumenical garb, were not the issue. Santorum’s publicity -- and his language -- exudes coded evangelical messages. One spot, for example, proudly pointed out that all of Santorum’s children were home-schooled.

Leave aside the astounding reality that in 2012, a presidential candidate would apparently consider it a selling point that he opted his children out of the most basic unifying civic experience we have. The sole reason for Santorum to invoke home-schooling was its close association with evangelicals who reject what they consider the secular humanism of public schools. The Catholic Church, notably, does not encourage homeschooling; it has schools of its own.

Once the caucus votes were cast, Santorum again spoke in strikingly evangelical terms. In explaining how he had found the strength to conduct his 99-county campaign, he said that “when I was getting up in the morning to take on that challenge, I’ve required a strength from another particular friendship, one that is sacred.” There is nothing un-Catholic in this, of course. But the friendship of a personal savior who walks beside you as you perform your daily tasks is a staple of American evangelicalism of the Tim Tebow variety -- not the austere, rational religion of Pope Benedict XVI.

Santorum’s appeal to evangelicals marks one of the great developments in modern American religion and politics: the closure of the once-yawning theological and cultural gap between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants long distrusted and denounced Catholicism almost as much as they did Mormonism. The King James Version of the Bible originally carried an introductory dedication describing the pope as “that man of sin.”

Evangelicals preserved this contempt for the Whore of Babylon long after mainstream Protestants gave it up and voted for John F. Kennedy. Well past 2000, Bob Jones University, the evangelical institution in Greenville, S.C., kept a 1980 article on its website condemning Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority for forming an alliance with “the Church of Antichrist.”

How, then, did Catholics and evangelicals find common ground? Roe v. Wade was the unlikely engine of the shift. Gradually, the two groups began to cooperate on a broader conservative political agenda. Ronald Reagan won the votes of both.

There are still doctrinal differences: the “culture of life” advocated by Pope John Paul II condemns the death penalty alongside abortion, a position few American evangelicals embrace. But these distinctions can be elided, particularly by a Catholic politician with a willingness to pick and choose. Cafeteria Catholicism isn’t limited to liberal Catholics. And no one is proposing that priests deny Santorum the sacraments for supporting capital punishment.

For Romney, Santorum’s success in Iowa has two messages. One is that he can consider Santorum as a possible running mate. Some think that Romney would need an evangelical Protestant at his side, not because evangelicals would defect to Obama, but because they might stay home rather than vote for a Mormon. Iowa shows that a Catholic might serve just as well. (This also has implications for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.)

The second, more profound message is about the encouraging flexibility of American Protestantism. Eventually, Mormonism will be accepted just as Catholicism is, the old theological hurdles left behind as embarrassing relics of a bygone, intolerant age. Mitt Romney could be forgiven for hoping it happens between now and November.
