Charles Mitchell begs and pleads with his fellow evangelicals to forget their doctrinal differences with Mormonism and jump on the presidential bandwagon with Mitt Romney. His pragmatic approach may or may not succeed in vaulting the former Massachussetts governor to the White House, but I would suggest he and others in his camp abandon an element of their argument which I find particularly odious.
"As we have said since the earliest days of this campaign cycle, the 2008 election is for president, not pastor," reads the opening sentence of Mitchell's Townhall.com column. This is a quintessential "straw man" that is both condescending and insulting to the very constituency Mitchell wishes to persuade. A pastor is the spiritual leader of a congregation. A president is the political leader of a nation. No one who has expressed reservations about Romney based on religious questions can be accused of failing to understand that distinction. More likely, Mitchell is throwing around the term "pastor" in a more generic (and incorrect) context to refere to any leader to whom religious persons look for guidance. Not all such leaders are "pastors" in the literal, functional sense of the word. Few, if any, of them would fare well in the realm of secular political leadership (the jury still being out on Mike Huckabee)
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