Southern Baptist votes must have been a target when presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee.

With 80% of Baptist ministers supporting McCain but congregations tiring of church in involvement in politics, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission made it clear an August 8 that he saw her as the breath of life for the Baptists-as-Republicans electoral strategy which twice did so much to elect George Bush the younger.

In an interview with CBS News, Land recommended Palin because:

... she's a person of strong faith. She just had her fifth child, a Downs Syndrome child. And there's a wonderful quote that she gave about her baby, and the fact that she would never, ever consider having an abortion just because her child had Downs Syndrome. She's strongly pro-life.
She's a virtual lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. She would ring so many bells. And I just think it would help with independents because she's a woman. She's a reform Governor. I think that, from what I hear, that would be the choice that would probably ring the most bells, along with Mike Huckabee, of course, who's a Southern Baptist.

He greeted the announcement of her candidacy with the proclamation that she is "straight out of veep central casting."

With that recommendation followed, Land and other SBC leaders are trying to deliver the vote with a 40-day Prayer Vigil for Spiritual Revival and National Renewal.

Starting Sept. 24, those involved are to offer daily prayers will include requests for God's guidance in voting, for the election of more "godly" Christians, for God to "help churches find ways to help Christians get to the polls" and for public officials to be protected "from the attacks of Satan."

Richard V. Pierard, professor of history emeritus at Indiana State University, writes in Beliefnet that:

More than 1,300 churches [out of the SBC's reported 42,000] have allegedly signed up for the prayer campaign, which the denomination is promoting through Internet links, conference calls with pastors and a promotional DVD.

The effort is, according to the Associated Press, a companion to the iVoteValues and iLiveValues efforts being carried out jointly by Land's group the the right-wing Family Research Council.

Planning for those efforts dates back many months and suggests that while McCain's culture wars electoral strategy was to some degree forced upon him, Southern Baptist involvement was well-engineered.

              

(update below)

Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain gave a misleading answer to his first Faith Forum question, and so tarnished his entire performance.

As Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren put it to McCain on Saturday, "Now, my first question: Was the cone of silence comfortable that you were in just now?"

McCain answered, "I was trying to hear through the wall" and thus told a charming lie.

His dishonesty first became apparent when NBC News' Andrea Mitchell reported Sunday the Obama campaign's objection that McCain was not secluded.

Affirming Mitchell's account the New York Times' Kit Seelye wrote today:

Senator John McCain was not in a "cone of silence" on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California... The matter is of interest because Mr. McCain, who followed Mr. Obama's hourlong appearance in the forum, was asked virtually the same questions as Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain's performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of Mr. Obama, that he was not as isolated during the Obama interview as Mr. Warren implied. ...
Mr. Warren, the pastor of Saddleback, had assured the audience while he was interviewing Mr. Obama that "we have safely placed Senator McCain in a cone of silence" and that he could not hear the questions... Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis confirmed the allegation in a heated letter of protest to NBC. Davis wrote, "The fact is that during Senator Obama's segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed."

Davis was of course protesting Mitchell's report by using the time-honored "seppuku strategy" of affirming the accuracy of the report and then screaming that the accurate and relevant report should not have been aired or published.

McCain's dishonesty regarding "the cone of silence" gave additional force to the allegation that his Saddleback account of Christmas in Saigon was freely adapted from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of his time in the Soviet Gulags.

McCain talked of a Vietnamese prison guard drawing the sign of the cross in the sand (an account which absent from McCain's detailed, 1973 account of his time in North Vietnamese prison, and apparently first emerged in 1999 when his bid for the Republican presidential nomination made it convenient.).

Solzhenitn's strikingly similar account in "The Gulag Archipelago" (published in the U.S. in 1973) is:

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible

McCain attends a Baptist Church and certainly knows that actual faith in the way of the Cross requires one to tell the truth about both trivial and important things, not fudge one's account of events three and half decades past. And not fudge one's account of events an hour or so past.

I don't think the right name for those who fudge is "straight shooter."

McCain's behavior in both of these instances appears to have been that of a "hypocrite."

The Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily has called Rick Warren out for his failures to tell the truth.

In "How Fast Can Rick Warren Spin," Mark McEntire, an associate professor of religion at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., carefully contrasts the claims Warren made during the Aug. 16 ":Faith Forum" at Saddleback Church with the revelations and admissions which have followed.

McEntire ends with a call for public repentance and abandonment of any plans for future fora:

What I believe is certain is that Warren needs to apologize to the candidates and his audience, first, for not telling the truth, and second, for arguing, after he was caught not telling the truth, that the truth does not really matter.
The first "Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency" was a bad idea from the start, and Warren and his church proved ill-equipped to handle it. Let's hope it was the last.

              

Under Republican Sen. John McCain's health plan, he and Elizabeth Edwards have something in common, Ms. Edwards has explained in several contexts.

The text of McCain's proposals suggests that neither his melanoma nor her breast cancer would be covered, because both are pre-existing conditions.

She was more pointed in The Wonk Room, a blog sponsored by The Center for American Progress.

Wife of former Democratic presidential candidate and vice presidential nominee John Edwards, she wrote:

... I do understand exactly how devastating it will be to people who have the health conditions with which the Senator and I are confronted (melanoma for him, breast cancer for me) but do not have the financial resources we have. In very unconfusing language: they are left outside the clinic doors.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe (4.2.08), Ms. Edwards elucidated those points and others:

McCain and his staff argue that his plan is more efficient, and it is, although the savings are captured by way of increased human pain and shortened lives.

              

San Antonio Pastor John Hagee, in 'NYT' This Sunday, Says McCain Sought His Endorsement, which he of course gave.

E&P Editor Greg Mitchell wrote:

In an interview that will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, controversial televangelist Rev. John Hagee declares, "It's true that [John] McCain's campaign sought my endorsement."
Senator and soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate McCain has attempted to distance himself from some of Hagee's views, much as Democrat Barack Obama is doing in relation to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But unlike McCain, Obama has not stood on stage with Wright and accepted his accolades this year.

From Bill Moyer's Journal we learn that Hagee has suggested that Hurricane Katrina was punishment to the U.S. for its role in removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. He has called for war with Iran to facilitate "the rapture," and more.

McCain has a history of caring little about such radicalism, or not at all. He says he doesn't support every Hagee view. Which, as intended, leaves McCain in a position of considerable sympathy for the views of Hagee and others like him.

Of course. How else could McCain sustain his friendship and/or close working relationship with Hagee and others of like mind?

              

Associate Washington Post Editor Eugene Robinson's blog at the offers admiring insight into Democrat Barack Obama's Road Map on Race.

Faith in Public Life covers the Man Behind the Southern Baptist Climate Initiative. He is currently a seminarian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina and gives an interesting interview.

Semi-Happy Seventh Birthday today to DangerBush's Faith-Based Initiatives. Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement, writes about them accurately and with clarity.

Republican soon-to-be Presidential nominee John McCain's relationship with his ultra-right pastor is covered by Mother Jones' David Corn in McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam. After reading that you may agree that McCain really wants A permanent war, as does the Bush Administration.

Changing days have of late frequently blessed the lives of politically powerful members of the Christian Right. Jeff Sharlet covers them with acid humor in This is Not a Religion Column: Christian Candidate Quiz Bowl.