Evangelicals now vote for Catholics. Will they also vote for a Mormon?

Defying a history of?anti-Catholicism, evangelical leaders recently endorsed GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum (a Catholic), and South Carolina Evangelicals voted Catholic Newt Gingrich to victory in their primary. Will Mormon Mitt Romney be next to win them over?

Many years ago, one of my best history teachers gave me advice I have never forgotten. ?Don?t just listen to what people say,? he urged. ?Listen to what they leave out, too.?

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I thought of this remark as I read news reports about Newt Gingrich?s victory in South Carolina?s GOP primaries last weekend. In a state where evangelical Christians make up 65 percent of Republican voters, 44 percent of Evangelicals cast their ballots for Mr. Gingrich. Tied for second were Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, who each received 21 percent of the evangelical vote.

Several news outlets reminded readers that Mr. Romney is a Mormon rather than an Evangelical, which could have hurt his showing among conservative Protestants. Going forward, so might his recently released tax returns, which revealed that Romney and his wife donated more than $4 million to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in 2010 and 2011.

But here?s what almost nobody noted: Gingrich and Mr. Santorum aren?t evangelical Christians, either. They?re Catholics.

Their evangelical backing is a truly astonishing fact, given the long history of anti-Catholicism among evangelical Protestants in America. For more than three centuries, Evangelicals insisted that Catholicism represented a mortal threat to the body politic. But over the past three decades, they have joined hands with their former foes to change the face of politics altogether.

Start with Puritan New England, where ministers taught their flocks that the Pope was the ?Beast of Rome? ? that is, Satan incarnate. ?This is a Catholick Church of the Devil, but not of Christ,? preached the Cambridge-educated John Cotton, who migrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s.

After America split off from England, evangelical clergy added a new charge: that Catholicism was incompatible with democratic self-rule. According to Connecticut minister Lyman Beecher, whose daughter Harriet would author the anti-slavery classic Uncle Tom?s Cabin, Catholicism was itself a system of mental and theological enslavement. Whereas Protestants thought for themselves, Beecher said, Catholics yoked their minds ? and their souls ? to Rome.

In the 1930s, when fascism enveloped Germany and Italy, American Evangelicals blamed the allegedly authoritarian tendencies of Catholics in both countries. And when a new totalitarian enemy arose in the 1950s, critics likened America?s Communist enemy to, yes, Catholicism. Both institutions brainwashed Americans and bound them to a ?foreign? power, the story went, whether in Moscow or Rome.

Anti-Catholicism was still so strong in 1960 that John F. Kennedy had to make a speech assuring voters that, if elected president, he would not take ?instructions on public policy from the Pope.? But relations started to warm in the 1970s, when the Supreme Court?s Roe v. Wade decision brought conservative Protestants and Catholics into the pro-life movement.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/d-I3o-J8sl4/Evangelicals-now-vote-for-Catholics.-Will-they-also-vote-for-a-Mormon

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