Years and centuries from now, when our children and their descendants look back on the election of 2012, they will see that in the history written about that election, faithful Christians did what was right.
Alex Murashko reports for the Christian Post, November 8, 2012, that both evangelicals and faithful Catholics overcame whatever misgivings we had about Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith to turn out in droves to vote for him.
Among Catholics, it was the faithful and white Catholics who came through for Romney. Faithful or practicing Catholics (whom the media call “traditional Catholics,” a misnomer) are those who actually obey the Church’s rule of attending Sunday (or Saturday vigil) Mass every week. Not to do that is a mortal sin, which means that those Catholics who don’t are apostates.
Catholic voters who regularly attend Mass broke 67% for Romney to 32% for Obama. This represented a swing of 35% in the direction of the GOP since 2008. Romney also won white Catholics by a margin of 59% to 40%, a margin of 19 points among a group that historically has voted for the winner. Nevertheless, Obama still narrowly won the overall Catholic vote driven largely by over performing among Hispanic Catholics, who put their self-interest about immigration over and above Obama’s pro-abortion and pro-infanticide stance.
In voting for Obama, those white and Hispanic Catholics went against the explicit stricture of the Church on abortion being an intrinsic evil, the importance of which supercedes other considerations such as immigration and “social justice” concerns for the poor.
As for evangelical Christians, a national post-election survey by the Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC) found that, unlike the Ron Paul cultists, evangelicals turned out to vote in record numbers, comparable to their turnout for George W. Bush in 2004. Ralph Reed, chairman of FFC, noted, “That is an astonishing outcome that few would have predicted even a few months ago.”
78% of evangelical Christian votes went to Romney; 21% to Obama. Reed intimated that those evangelicals who voted for Obama tend to be youths and minorities. In fact, as in 2008, not factoring religion or faith, Obama easily won the youth vote nationally, 67% to 30%.
The evangelical vote actually increased in 2012 to a record 27% of the electorate. This was the highest share of the vote in modern political history for evangelicals. Romney’s performance among evangelicals represented a net swing of 10% over John McCain’s performance in 2008.
Prior to the election, Reed had promised to use his coalition to mobilize an army of grassroots activists nationwide in order to get Christian voters to the polls in numbers never seen before. And Reed delivered on his promise. The coalition said it has distributed 30 million voter guides passed out in 117,000 churches, 24 million pieces of mail, and has made 23 million get-out-the-vote calls.
“Virtually the entire increase in Mitt Romney’s vote compared to John McCain’s in 2008 came because of higher turnout and higher support from evangelical voters,” said Glen Bolger, the pollster who conducted the survey.
Putting the issue of voters’ faith aside, Romney did better than McCain in 2008 in almost every demographic category. But Obama was helped by a strong turnout from his own party and Latinos [and Democrat voter fraud, Ron Paul cultists' abstention, and the Obama administration's suppression of the military vote. See my post, "Why we lost the 2012 election."]
Faith and Family Coalition’s post-election survey was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and included interviewing 1,600 actual 2012 voters. The margin of error is +/- 2.45%.
And so, Obama is reelected to a second term not for lack of effort from faithful Christians. We did the right thing. We overcame our theological differences with Mormonism because we correctly recognize that Obama and the Democrats represent true evil. We turned out in even larger numbers than in 2008 and voted overwhelmingly for religious liberty, the sanctity of life and marriage, and limited government.
We lost the political battle. But we can stand before God in good conscience as His faithful servants. We did “put on the armor of God” and stood “firm against the tactics of the devil … on the evil day.” “Having done everything,” we now hold our ground and “stand fast,” with our “loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate,” our “feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace” and “in all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” (Ephesians 6)
We will need that shield because the faithful Christian vote is not lost on Obama and the Demonrats. So be prepared for their reprisals, mindful that Obama had already pronounced that his supporters would “vote for revenge,” while his malevolent senior adviser consigliere, the Iran-born Marxist Valerie Jarrett, has vowed:
“After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time. Everyone not with us is against us and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve. There is going to be hell to pay. Congress won’t be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after this is over and we have two judges ready to go.”
We have been warned by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago about the coming persecution. Alarmed about Obama’s war against the Catholic Church and against religious liberty, Cardinal George said “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”
~Eowyn