McCain's Inept Pandering to Religious Conservatives

It’s sort of fun watching John McCain try to suck up to the religious right – because he’s just so bad at it.

Take John Hagee. McCain was no doubt told that Hagee is a popular and influential Christian leader. He figured this is exactly the kind of person he needs to appeal to “evangelical Christians.”

But most evangelical leaders view Hagee as out of the mainstream. It’s not just his views on Catholics; most evangelicals have been shying away from anti-Catholic rhetoric for a few decades now. It’s also that Hagee subscribes to points of theology outside the evangelical mainstream. He’s a believer in “prosperity Gospel” which states that poverty is a curse, resulting in part from one's own lack of faith (and alternatively that through faith you can gain prosper mightily, which indicates he's a man of very deep faith as he pays himself more than $1 million a year in salary).

The second is that Jews can get salvation without accepting Christ because of their original covenant with God, which bucks basic protestant theology.

Putting aside the merits of either argument, neither represents mainstream evangelical thought. Hagee certainly does have many fans in the evangelical world, but there are many others who would get you a broader range of evangelicals support without alienating the largest swing vote (Catholics).

This isn’t the first sign that McCain is inept at courting the religious right. In his interview with Beliefnet he first said he wouldn’t have a Muslim in the cabinet (a spot-on appeal to religious conservatives) and then retracted it. And when asked whether the Constitution envisioned a Christian nation, he said yes. Every conservative politician schooled in how to court conservatives knows that the safe way to say it is that “America was a Christian nation” or “founded on Judeo-Christian values.” The first is defensible as a demographic matter; it was mostly Christian. The second signals you’re one of the club without being so specific you scare people. But unschooled in the art, McCain went farther than most by claiming that the Constitution guaranteed a Christian nation, which is patently absurd.

Perhaps he should go back to calling religious conservative leaders “agents of intolerance.”