After Mitt Romney secure the Republican nomination, prominent Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress has said that Christians should vote for the Mormon candidate over President Obama since he “espouses unbiblical principles.” Such a sentiment is striking since Jeffress attacked Romney’s Mormon faith in the 2008 and 2012 primary elections, hoping that the GOP would nominate an evangelical Christian like Rick Perry over Romney as Mormonism is “a heresy from the pit of Hell.” Now, Jeffress is rallying evangelical support for Romney, despite his prior warning that electing a Mormon will lead to God’s judgment.
Jeffress told Janet Mefferd, who has also criticized Romney over his faith, that it is still better to vote for Romney, even though he is a member of a “cult” and “false religion” that believes in a “multiplicity of gods,” than Obama because of his stances on marriage equality and abortion rights. The pastor said defeating Obama is even worth potentially giving Mormon missionaries a tool to bolster “legitimacy of their faith” and make more converts.
I still think there are concerns out there among evangelicals about voting for a Mormon. I’ve made peace with it; the way I’ve made peace with it is to make it very clear on programs like yours that Mormonism is a cult, it is a false religion, Mormons worship a multiplicity of gods, they deny the Bible, in fact they think the Bible is so error-filled there had to be a second book of revelations. I want to make it very clear that I don’t believe Mormonism is Christianity but I do think that in this case it is better to vote for a non-Christian who supports biblical principles like life and marriage than voting for a professing Christian like Barack Obama who absolutely repudiates what Jesus Christ said about some key issues.
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I don’t want to minimize the Mormonism issue. I had probably the most well-known pastor in America say to me last week; you know one concern is the mission implications of this, Mormons are so involved in missions overseas, they’ll be able to point to a Mormon president as legitimacy of their faith. So I think we need to be clear that Mormonism is a false religion that leads people away from rather than toward the true God, but having said that we are making this choice in spite of that.
He warned that America is “about to go over the moral and spiritual cliff from which there is no return” if Obama is re-elected, asserting that his administration is “openly involved in high-handed sins” and shaking its “fist in the face of God” on matters like same-sex marriage.
You know in the Old Testament the Bible had what it called high-handed sins, sins that were like a clenched fist in the face of God. We are now seeing an administration that is openly involved in high-handed sins: the embracing of gay marriage. A friend of mine said to me recently, ‘think about this just ten years ago if a pastor or a sandwich company were to say marriage is between a husband and a wife, a man and a woman, no one would have batted an eye at that, but today that is labeled as hate speech,’ now what has changed? It’s not the Bible or the message that has changed, it shows what has happened in our culture. I know this sounds alarmist but I believe we are at the precipice, we are at a tipping point in our country right now, we are about to go over not the fiscal cliff, we are about to go over the moral and spiritual cliff from which there is no return, and that is why it is imperative for Christians to get out and vote in this election.
