Catholics and Evangelicals Finally Friends

It was an extraordinary moment at the Republican convention last month when Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher turned politician, criticized Barack Obama for insisting that people have to “violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care. Friends . . . let me say it as clearly as possible, that the attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me.” The attack to which Huckabee was referring, of course, is that section of President Obama’s health care plan which requires virtually all institutions to provide contraceptives to their employees, even those religious organizations which reject contraception on moral grounds.

But it is unlikely that Huckabee’s fraternal solidarity with Catholics would have been quite so ardently stated a few decades ago. After all, Evangelicals and Catholics, the two largest religious groups in the United States, had never been close Christian companions. On the contrary, they often regarded each other as opponents, with Evangelicals seeing Catholics as captive to strange, unbiblical traditions such as the worship of Mary and the veneration of saints and relics. Catholics, for their part, saw Evangelicals as fundamentalist yahoos, little familiar with the great tradition of theological development through the centuries.