Folded into the
Reverend Frank Page's wallet is a yellow scrap of paper
with the date and time he is to speak with yet another
Republican candidate for the White House.
He already has
visited one Republican front-runner over breakfast at a
country club and met another at the headquarters of a car
dealership in his home state.
The South
Carolina pastor seems surprised by the attention, but he
should not be: He leads a large congregation in a
state with an early primary and is president of the
16.3 million-strong Southern Baptist Convention,
perhaps the largest single group of evangelical voters and a
must-have Republican constituency.
Page, in an
interview at his denomination's annual meeting here last
week, said he offers his thoughts about salvation to
candidates but never an endorsement. And he talks to
Democrats too. He sees the political courtship as a
duty: The nation's leaders need to hear a Christian
viewpoint, he believes.
But some Southern
Baptists would rather stay out of politics altogether.
A small but vocal number of pastors believe the denomination
is too cozy with Republicans and too political in
general. By flirting with the line separating good
citizenship and a grab for power, they say, a
denomination already experiencing flat membership risks
alienating more people.
Others contend
such talk might inspire Southern Baptists to retreat from
the public square and cede ground on urgent social issues
such as abortion.
If anything, the
debate is likely to become even stronger in coming
months because no one Republican candidate has captured the
conservative evangelical imagination--and all of
them are trying.
''Most younger
Southern Baptist leaders would strongly affirm good
citizenship and voting and involvement in the political
process,'' said Marty Duren, 43, a Georgia pastor.
''But they don't confound personal involvement with
organizing for political power, which we saw in
organizations like the Moral Majority.''
Duren also cited
national Southern Baptist leaders who joined politicians
at ''Justice Sunday'' events promoting conservative judicial
appointments in 2005 and 2006.
So far, such
views are in the minority. In San Antonio, Duren proposed an
anti-partisanship resolution urging convention leaders ''to
exercise great restraint when speaking on behalf of
Southern Baptists so as not to intermingle their
personal political persuasions with their chief
responsibility to represent Jesus Christ and this
convention.''
The resolution
that was ultimately adopted, ''On Pastors, Culture, and
Civic Duty,'' did not mention partisanship. Instead, it
suggested pastors follow the late Jerry Falwell's lead
by speaking out on burning moral issues and promote
''informed and active Christian citizenship.''
''The worst thing
that can happen is for people of faith to say, 'You
know, that's really not our arena, we're just going to
abandon it to the secularists,' '' said the Reverend
Jerry Sutton of Tennessee, whose church hosted the
second Justice Sunday assembly.
Southern Baptists
have been solidly Republican since the emergence of the
antiabortion movement, the denomination's ''conservative
resurgence'' of the late 1970s, and Ronald Reagan's
election in 1980, and there is no indication of that
wavering.
''There is a long
history of dissent among Southern Baptists, so the
discordant voices about politics are not necessarily a
harbinger of change,'' said John Green, a senior
fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Page, however,
has sympathy for Southern Baptists worried about closeness
to Republicans.
Page met Sen.
John McCain. He also has met and traded e-mails with former
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a Republican presidential
hopeful and Southern Baptist minister who signed
copies of his new book at the SBC annual meeting.
What might
surprise some evangelicals is that Page also chatted over
breakfast at a country club with Rudy Giuliani, the former
New York City mayor vilified by many social
conservatives for his support of abortion rights and
for his messy second divorce.
Page said the two
discussed everything from the Roman Catholic Mass to
evangelical beliefs about accepting Christ. He said he told
Giuliani, ''We like you as a person,'' singling out
his leadership in New York after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. But Page also described ''an honest
dialogue about abortion, about gay rights--and those
are extreme differences.''
The phone number
in Page's back pocket: It belongs to a representative of
former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who is making a
strong push to court evangelicals.
Page and others
talk about keeping lines open to Democrats. But that is
fraying over an initiative led by former presidents Jimmy
Carter and Bill Clinton to unite Baptists from various
denominations across racial lines to counter
conservative SBC influence.
Like evangelicals
as a whole, Baptists remain divided on which candidate
to support, though the focus is heavily on Republicans.
Richard Land, one
of the nation's most politically influential Southern
Baptists, said he has been sought out by Republican
campaigns (Huckabee, McCain, Duncan Hunter) and
Democratic ones (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack
Obama). He has met some and plans to meet others, but does
not endorse candidates.
Land and other
evangelicals accepted an invitation to meet with Romney,
whose Mormonism worries some evangelicals. Land said he
advised Romney to give a speech laying out how his
faith would shape his presidency, much the same way
John F. Kennedy spoke to a ministers group in Houston to
allay Protestant fears of a shadow Vatican presidency.
''I said to him,
'Governor, I personally don't think the Mormonism is a
deal-killer. But the only person who can convince millions
of Americans to vote for a Mormon president is Mitt
Romney,' '' said Land, who heads the SBC's Ethics and
Religious Liberties Commission.
The name
generating perhaps the most excitement among Southern
Baptists is someone who has not even entered the race
yet: Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the actor and former
senator.
''Another
Southern Baptist called Fred Thompson the Ronald Reagan of
the South, and I think he has some of that appeal,''
said SBC executive committee president Morris Chapman,
adding he has not settled on a candidate yet. ''He is
a magnetic personality. He seems to articulate his
opinions clearly. He seems to be unflappable.''
Chapman sees the
debate about political engagement, partisanship, and
evolving agendas as healthy.
''We are most of
the time intent on expressing our convictions--the
moral and ethical issues that face us as a nation,''
he said. ''And some diversity is not bad. It adds to
the fabric of who Southern Baptists really are.''
(Eric Gorski, AP)