The NYTimes asked some religious pundits about Governor Mark Sanford’s repeated allusions to God and self-comparisons to King David. Some samples:
Chuck Colson:
When God created humans, His first act was to join the first man and woman as one flesh. Marriage is therefore a pre-political institution, the first of three institutions specifically ordained by God. It is therefore a sacred covenant between man, woman and God. Having read the governor’s latest statements about several prior dalliances (enough confessing already, please) I think he needs to go home, and get his own house in order before he can do much for the state of South Carolina.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:
The paradox of American evangelicals is that they are Christian on the one hand and political conservatives on the other with utterly opposing views of redemption. Christians believe that no one is blameless and all must therefore ride the coattails of a perfect being into heaven. But conservatives espouse the gospel of personal accountability. The state cannot save them. Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and not by welfare alone.
Steven Waldman (Beliefnet):
The problem with this is that Jesus never suggested that being cleansed of spiritual sin meant you were exempted from temporal punishment. A murderer who accepts Christ might still get to heaven, but he doesn’t get sprung from Leavenworth.
Colleen Carroll Campbell (whose book Julie & I reviewed a few years ago)
A politician who publicly champions traditional values while failing to faithfully live his own marriage vows may be a moral weakling, and he certainly loses a good deal of credibility on those issues when he fails to live his professed values in his private life. But his personal failings do not automatically discredit the causes for which he was fighting or serve as irrefutable proof that he never believed in those causes in the first place.
"Mark was the self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig who pressed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment; Marco was the un-self-conscious Lothario, canoodling with Maria in Buenos Aires, throwing caution to the e-wind about their “soul-mate feel,” her tan lines, her curves. Mark is so frugal for the taxpayers that he made his staffers use both sides of Post-it notes. Marco is a sly scamp who found a sneaky way to make South Carolina taxpayers pay for a south-of-the-border romp with his mistress."
