Miscellanea Agnostica

I blogged earlier about John McCain’s pastor problems. Today he finally rejected endorsements by two prominent evangelical preachers, John Hagee and Rod Parsley. Hagee had built a career on anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic comments; Parlsey has been an outspoken critic of Islam, going so far as to claim that the U.S. had been founded (by God, I guess) for the express purpose of destroying Islam.

The names of Hagee and Parsley are not familiar to most Americans, but they are extremely well-known in fundamentalist Christian circles and highly influential Protestant preachers. Here are references for each, in case you want to know more about them:

• Pastor John Hagee
• Pastor Rod Parsley

Can we now please get past clerical endorsements of presidential candidates? Is it not clear, finally, that the time has come to terminate this practice forever?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under American Religio-Politics, Christianity, Separation of church and state, U.S. Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.