Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Pastors and Politics

Rev. Wallace Henley gives a great response to Pastor Perry Noble's recent statements challenging pastors to not endorse political candidates . . .

“You’re an ordained minister, aren’t you?” The question came to me from a staffer in a congressional office where I worked fifteen years ago. I was the congressman’s district director and briefly acting chief of staff. Years before I had been a White House aide.

The congressional staff member’s rhetorical question inferred another, unspoken: “If you are a pastor what are you doing here?”

I could have replied, “For the same reason the pastors who made up seven percent of the nation’s first Congress were there … For the same reason Pastor Frederick Muhlenberg was the first Speaker of the House of Representatives … For the same reason — as listed by the Pew Research Center — that Pastors Benjamin Contee, Abiel Foster, James Manning, Joseph Montgomery, Jesse Root, Paine Wingate, John Witherspoon, and John Joachim Zubly were there … For the same reason Mississippi AME Pastor Hiram Rhodes Revels became, in 1870, the first black man to serve in the Senate (despite the opposition of Democrats who argued that, as a former slave, he had not been a citizen until the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted).”

Read the entire article, Pastor Perry Noble Is Wrong About Pastors in Politics, here.

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