It’s also coming from the pews, though, where some Protestant see troubling implications for all religious groups.
By TOM BREEN
Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. — After the White House decreed this month that religious employers would have to pay for workers’ birth control, it was no surprise that Roman Catholic leaders would protest. That evangelical Protestants would rally to their cause was less expected and unthinkable even a generation ago.
“It’s just the common good. We’re all brothers. They’re Christians, we’re Christians,” said Thomas Fallon, 43, a general contractor who lives in Auburn, Mass., and converted to Southern Baptism from Catholicism. “We have that belief system that this is wrong that the government is trying to impose on our religious beliefs.”
The support reflects how the country’s two largest religious affiliations have learned to find common ground in the political arena in the half-century since John F. Kennedy became the nation’s only Catholic president. He had to promise a group of Protestant pastors that he wouldn’t try to ban divorce or birth control to allay fears of a White House guided on moral issues by the Vatican.
Contraception is one of the very issues that have been a wedge between Catholics and evangelical Protestants for decades. But for Protestants who’ve rallied to the Catholic bishops’ side, the question this time is one of religious liberty rather than dogma.
Even after the Obama administration hastily revised the order to require insurance companies, rather than religious employers, to pay for birth control, many evangelicals say the bishops are right to reject the new rule as the same violation of conscience in a different form.
“I don’t think it should be mandated for anybody to have to offer or pay for it,” said David Teague, 48, a salesman who attends The Donelson Fellowship, a Freewill Baptist church in Nashville, Tenn. “The government is, in my view, way too intrusive in many areas, this being one of them.”
Not long ago, even the claim that Catholics and Protestants are both Christians would have raised objections in some quarters, let alone the idea that they stand together on an issue of theological disagreement.
Most of the discontent has been voiced so far by leaders in the evangelical world, like Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
“You at least have to admire the courage of the Roman Catholic bishops in saying they are willing to go to jail rather than to comply with this,” Mohler said in one of his daily podcasts. “How many evangelical presidents and pastors and leaders will be willing to do the same?”
It’s also coming from the pews, though, where some Protestant see troubling implications for all religious groups.