Richard Land said yesterday that if Barack Obama were elected, it will not be with new evangelical votes. Early polls suggest Land may be correct, with evangelicals falling around 72-26 percent for John McCain. Earlier this evening, I spoke with Land, who is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
My first reaction is that there’s something really good about our country and something we ought to celebrate that an African American has been elected president. John McCain was running against an economic tsunami. The economy took up all the oxygen in the room.
The marriage amendment in Florida is passing by the required 60 percent. That’s good news. It’s very likely that the marriage amendment is going to pass in all three states, which is good news for defenders of traditional marriage.
Evangelicals did their part. The exit polling is showing that there’s no drop-off among evangelicals. The 2006 elections showed us that evangelicals can’t win elections by themselves. If indeed the three marriage initiatives win, it will show that the values voters were not the ones who lost this election.
If evangelicals are sad about the election, I’m going to say, ‘Do you have faith in God? Is your faith in God or in government?’
Obama voted as an extreme liberal. He campaigned as a centrist. We’ll have to see how he governs. We’ll find that out in the next few months.
