"I believe abortion should be outlawed" and "The Bible is pretty clear about homosexuality, it specifically calls it a sin." Thus sayeth Pastor Dan Yeary. Normally the preachments of a Southern Baptist oriented minister in North Phoenix, Arizona wouldn't stir much of a fuss. That kind of hard nosed saber rattle against gays and abortion is SOP within and among Southern Baptist preachers.
But Yeary's comments deserve special attention for a couple of reasons. He's the pastor of North Phoenix Baptist Church. And one among the faithful who can often be seen occupying a pew at Yeary's Sunday services is John McCain. For more than a decade Yeary has been his pastor and spiritual mentor. His rock solid anti-gay and abortion preachments have not been looped on YouTube, endlessly repeated on every major network, peddled on legions of websites, emailed, and text messaged to millions, and gabbed about ad nauseum from the suites to street corners as Obama's much embattled pastor Jeremiah Wright's racial diatribes still are.
There are no calls for Yeary to explain, justify, or defend his views. There is no known press effort to dig deeper and find out what else Yeary might have said that could cast him as a wild eye extremist and by extension taint his star parishioner with guilt by association. Yeary is depicted as a benign, thoughtful, soft-spoken man of deep spiritual conscience and belief that downplays politics. His only mission is to save souls even those of damned to hell-fire homosexuals. Yeary, however, caught the drift of the Wright-Obama furor and figured out that some might start pecking around to find out if there were damaging rants that he made on gays and abortion that could be used to hammer McCain. He smartly headed that line of media and public march off at the pass and chuckled to a reporter that he didn't talk with McCain about politics and that he thought that if McCain were asked whether he agrees with some of his views he would emphatically say that he disagrees as Obama did with Wright.
That's fair and reasonable enough. Yet Yeary's denials his hard-line views on abortion and gay rights are politically edged, and they're shared by millions of voters. These are the millions that McCain banks on to help put him in the White House. But it was touch and go between him and them for a while. An embittered Focus on Family President James Dobson in 2007 loudly proclaimed that he wouldn't vote for McCain. That spelled potential trouble.
Even before Dobson lambasted McCain, then would be GOP presidential candidate McCain scrambled fast to head off a religious palace revolt. He did a sort of repentance to the evangelicals and came in from the cold when he delivered the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University in April 2006. Falwell promptly returned the favor and told the press that he was satisfied that McCain marched in lock step with many of his principles and beliefs. Falwell's imprimatur of approval on McCain was absolutely crucial to send the right signal to the Christian fundamentalist flock that he was an alright guy.
The Falwell-McCain détente was important for another reason. It was open acknowledgment that the Christian evangelicals could and should have a big say in politics. Despite Yeary's disavowal of politics, a political agenda is always on the table for Christian evangelical leaders and ministers. Many don't try to hide it. In a survey by the Detroit News in 2005 following Bush's reelection the question was asked whether the church should have more influence in politics. Nearly sixty percent agreed.
But Yeary, as many ministers, also know that to much talk about politics will leave them wide open to the charge that they are GOP stalking horses. Falwell was fond of shouting to supporters "I am not a Republican! I am not a Democrat! I am a noisy Baptist!" He was, of course, much more than that. And so is Yeary and the other ministers that deliver the conservative morals message to their Sunday flock.
The sixty to eighty million Christian evangelicals that Yeary speaks for are big, important, and politically positioned. In fact, in 2007 seven out of 10 Americans said they were Christian. They are strategically placed in many key swing states and their numbers haven't dropped. They have been the back bone of the GOP for a quarter century. Those that self-identify as evangelicals or born again Christians in 2004 made up nearly one out of four voters. They provided the vote muscle for Bush in 2000 and even more muscle for him in 2004. Yeary and McCain will move earth and especially heaven to make sure that they flex those muscles again in 2008 for the GOP.
Wright may have been a liability for Obama, but Yeary is certainly not one for McCain. Don't expect an unkind word here from McCain about his pastor.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).