Stay tuned to Christianity Today‘s politics blog all day tomorrow because we will be here.
Here are a few stories I intended to blog about today but ran out of energy due to a cold:
Minneapolis pastor John Piper on Why a Woman Shouldn’t Run for Vice President, but Wise People May Still Vote for Her
“In my view, defending abortion is far worse sin for a man than serving as Vice President is for a woman,” Piper writes.
Here’s the original video.
In an unrelated article, Eric Gorski of the Associated Press wrote about how the election came to churches on Sunday.
On Sunday and the past two weekends, volunteers in 14 states who belong to Protestant megachurches, politically active conservative churches and Catholic parishes distributed literature at their churches comparing McCain and Obama on hot-button social issues like abortion, gay marriage and judges. “Who Shares Your Values?” the flier says. “You decide.”
Bob Heckman of the McCain campaign told the AP that 15,000 people volunteered to distribute campaign literature.
On the Obama side, members of black churches in battleground states were asked to read what an aide described as a nonpartisan letter from the Illinois senator during church announcements.
Obama campaign officials declined to provide a copy of the letter or discuss it. But during the primary campaign, volunteers and staffers read a similar letter from Obama at black churches in South Carolina that didn’t explicitly ask people to vote for him but highlighted issues and encouraged voter participation.
Finally, Gorski also wrote a retrospective analysis on religion in the 2008 campaign. The end is a big depressing.
But Martin Marty, one of the nation’s pre-eminent religion scholars, already has reached one conclusion: the rancorous campaign has been bad for religion.
The retired University of Chicago professor wrote in a commentary this week that the exploitation and exhibition of religion in the race is “bad for the name of religion itself, for religious institutions, for a fair reading of sacred texts, for sundered religious communities, for swaggering religious communities which are too sure of themselves, for the pursuit of virtue, for extending the reach of religion too far.”
In other words, the loser in this election is religion.
