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Why evangelicals support serial adulterers, Mormons and morons for public office

By William J. Murray

William J. Murray

The Florida GOP primary was an embarrassment to me as an evangelical Christian. The election results were an embarrassment because they exposed the core of what motivates evangelicals – the bandwagon. Apparently, the louder and brighter the bandwagon is the more likely evangelicals will jump on board as it goes through town.

These are the same evangelicals who had left Michele Bachmann at the altar and tossed Gov. Rick Perry under the bus because those two evangelicals didn’t look like winners. This philosophy may go hand in hand with the number of evangelical pastors who are chasing the culture for church members rather than challenging the culture with the gospel.

The statistics in Florida were staggering. About 38 percent of evangelical Christians voted for an ultra-rich Mormon who made his money managing a hedge fund and has a dubious record as a conservative. Thirty-seven percent voted for a serial adulterer who owns a K Street firm that peddles influence in Washington, D.C. A staggering 5 percent voted for a libertarian who believes Israel should be abandoned and that the federal government should have no laws against recreational drugs such as heroin.

In all, 75 percent of the evangelical vote went to Romney and Gingrich, two men who have much in common. Both men supported the radical environmentalists’ “cap-and-trade” that would destroy American jobs. Both men supported mandated medical insurance. In Gingrich’s case he promoted Obamacare-type mandated insurance for nearly 20 years. Both men, at one time or another, supported some type of amnesty for illegal immigrants, which makes the rule of law a travesty. Both men supported the Wall Street bailouts. Sen. Santorum, who never held any of these liberal positions, received 15 percent of the evangelical vote.

Unlike Gingrich, Santorum has never been accused of adultery and has been married to just one woman for 22 years. My evangelical friends who support Newt Gingrich defend their support of him by telling me he has repented of his various affairs and sought forgiveness from his family and from God, and that his rather abysmal sexual behavior is forgiven. They fail to remember that the behavior occurred at a time he was a weekly, church-attending evangelical before converting to Catholicism. Those forgiving Newt Gingrich still giggle over the White House behavior of Bill Clinton.

Evangelicals in the GOP just want a winner, and it matters little to them what his religious beliefs are or what his personal behavior is. Evangelicals seem to have joined the rest of the mainstream Protestant church in America, which appears far more concerned with political and cultural issues than spiritual issues. If pastors would preach the gospel truth and warn about how sin leads to hell, as was done when America was still a great nation rather than a bankrupt nation, the church would once again become genuinely influential. If a gospel message rather than a social message were preached each Sunday, parishioners would seek honorable men of integrity to lead them, not circus clowns tossing candy from brightly lit bandwagons during an everlasting political Mardi Gras.

William J. Murray is the chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Religious Freedom Coalitionand the author of seven books including “My Life Without God,” which chronicles his early life in the home of destructive atheist and Marxist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the woman who filed the lawsuit removing prayer and Bible reading from America’s public schools. Having lived the Ayn Rand lifestyle, he has a unique prospective of the political candidates.