NEWSFLASH: Religious Endorsements for President all around

The religion blogosphere was up in arms yesterday over Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani in the Presidential race. As CNN reports, former presidential candidate and Kansas senator Sam Brownback also announced he would support John McCain, but the main focus in the following opinions center upon Robertson's intensely conservative social politics in a conflict of interest with Giuliani's relatively liberal social agenda.


First, Mollie at GetReligion simply lays out the facts, pointing out the very situation I've mentioned above. Why would one of the most notorious social conservatives in the U.S. support a candidate that is effectively pro-choice and not a champion for anti-homosexuality?

Well, Gary Stern addresses that very question: "There appears to be no other Republican candidate for evangelicals and conservative Catholics to rally around. Maybe security has become enough of a concern to conservatives that they are willing to look the other way at Giuliani’s support of abortion rights."

With conservative judges on the bench, are the pro-lifers just not worried about the abortion issue? Or, is the argument less relevant because of birth control and understanding more about sexual education?

I would doubt either, so the question remains prominent, addressed again here by BeliefNet's David Kuo, who asks: will this spell doom for the social conservatives? Aside from the abortion issue, if Giuliani is elected through support by the Christian Coalition, what happens to the war on homosexuality?

However, as Stern mentioned, the overriding issue surrounding Robertson's support for Giuliani seems to be his stance on security. BeliefNet's resident unapologetic political conservative Rod Dreher says, “Robertson explained that fighting Islamofascism is an issue of overriding importance to him, and that Giuliani is the best candidate in that sense. That makes sense to me. I don't agree with him, but what Robertson is saying is that this particular issue is so important that it cancels out Giuliani's objectionable stances.”

Dreher also gives a grocery list of other candidates seeing support from major religious figures.

In the end, then, it seems as though a more compromised stance is unavoidable from the conservative side of the current political spectrum. Will the disagreement between Religious Right groups spell defeat for the Republican candidate, whomever it may be? Again, this situation shows the importance of religious influence on the election; I guess, that is, if it affects the outcome. Only time will tell.