The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (September 03, 2008)

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03 Sep 2008 02:51 pm

Voting For Faith Alone

Some sanity here from Mark DeMoss, former chief of staff to Jerry Falwell and now a leading Christian public relations executive:

"Too many evangelicals and religious conservative are too preoccupied with values and faith and pay no attention to competence. We don't apply this approach to anything else in life, including choosing a pastor." Imagine, he said, if a church was searching for a pastor and the leadership was brought a candidate with great values but little experience. "They've been a pastor for two years at a church with 150 people but he shares our values, so we hired him to be pastor of our 5,000 person church? It wouldn't happen! We don't say, 'He shares our values, so let's hire him.' That's absurd. Yet we apply that to choosing presidents. It blows my mind."...

To be clear, DeMoss isn't saying Palin is unqualified. "The reality is, we don't know - and neither does McCain if he only met her once." The other Christian leaders who rallied around her didn't know much either. "I'm not hinting something's amiss but we don't know her and the people who gave her glowing response Friday didn't know. The euphoric rush to anoint without knowing -- it's a dangerous thing."

You can say that again.

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