Marco Rubio: Catholic, or Southern Baptist? Voters Deserve to Know

In the wake of a historic Republican electoral night victory, the international blogosphere is abuzz over the religious affiliation(s) of one the night’s major victors: Florida Senator-Elect Marco Rubio.

Damian Thompson of the UK Telegraph reports (though he isn’t the first to do so) that Rubio and his family attend and contribute to a supposed “non-denominational” church: Christ Fellowship, in Miami.

Let us be clear from the outset: Rubio is by all accounts an honorable statesman, and a true conservative whose policy proposals seem to be informed by a profoundly Catholic Christian humanism. I supported his Senate candidacy, and he certainly deserved the Catholic vote (and others as well).

Still, one’s religious affiliation does matter; voters have a right to know what informs the ideology and worldview of their elected leaders, and to take religious affiliation into account when determining who to give their vote to. There’s also a question of honesty: Mr. Rubio has long represented himself as a practicing Catholic, both at his once-official webpage at the Florida House and personally to a good friend of mine, who met him last year at a campaign stop in Tallahassee. I also know that the Catholic clergy of Tallahassee are under the impression Rubio was, and is, one of their own.

Is Marco Rubio talking out of both sides, the better to court both the Catholic and the Evangelical votes? Or is he just one more victim of the religious indifferentism that marks so much of today’s practical Catholicism, thanks to decades of spiritual malnourishment suffered at the hands of wicked, inept, or lazy prelates? It’s a question worth asking, and here’s hoping Rubio soon answers it.

And speaking of deception, I’ve a bone to pick with this “Christ Fellowship” congregation. Not with their poaching of former or lukewarm Catholics, but with their apparent lack of truth in advertising. They are, in fact, not “non-denominational,” but are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Why can’t they come out and say this? Scour their website, and you’ll find no indication whatsoever that this church has a denominational affiliation, not unless one is sufficiently familiar with American denominationalism to recognize that Christ Fellowship’s creedal statement mirrors that of the SBC.

Browsing through the official SBC website’s “ChurchSearch,” I’m stunned to find that so many “community churches” which try to pass themselves off as “non-denominational” are in fact staunchly Southern Baptist. Why are these churches trying to hide their religious affiliation? Here’s one theory:

Since the 16th century, Protestants have been troubled, and rightly so, with Christian denominationalism, recognizing as they do how contrary this is to the teachings of Jesus and the orthodox Christianity of the primitive Church. They also know that Christian denominationalism is a scandal to the non-Christian and post-Christian world, and a hamper to evangelization. By claiming the ” non-denominational” mantle, churches can pass themselves off as presenting the “pure, unadulterated” Christianity free from denominational “accretions.” This is, of course, a myth. Even those (very few) churches that truly don’t have a formal denominational affiliation are themselves denominations: independent Protestant denominations, with a congregation of one. They preach a distinctive doctrine, demand submission to a particular locus of pastoral leadership, and worship according to its own set rubrics. Their votaries get to thumb their noses down at “other” so-called Christians who care so much about “denominations”; these (the supposed “non-denominational”) can avoid having their doctrine be the 0bject of easy scrutiny, for their beliefs cannot easily be pinned down: they’re “simply Christian.”

Serious religious persons should not fall for this. If one wants to be truly non-denominational, one should embrace the doctrines of Catholicism. The Catholic Church alone can claim no human founder; it is the only Christian religious system that can claim (and claim credibly) to be institutionally descended from Biblical Judaism. Every other denomination, or independent “non-denomination”, can be traced to a particular founder, at a particular date, at a particular location, and never is this Jesus Christ, AD 29, Jerusalem. The only serious rival claimant is the Orthodox Church.

In this, the post-modern age, religious and “spiritual” persons are looking to “transcend” traditional affiliations, and Christians themselves, disenchanted with denominational in-fighting, are victim to these same tendencies. As I’ve written of earlier, the solution to Protestantism’s modern crisis is not further factionalism, the better to “purify” oneself from supposedly unBiblical excesses: rather, where reversion to Christendom’s Mother Church isn’t a viable option, Protestants need to come together and question some of the assumptions of the 16th and later centuries, especially the absurd doctrine of sola scriptura. Otherwise it is doomed to endless reinvention and post-modernism.

It’s unethical for denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention (and they aren’t the only one) to hide or obscure the denominational affiliation of their local parishes. If these congregations are ashamed to associate themselves with a religion founded in 1845  for the near-sole purpose of justifying the “Biblicalness” of the African-American slave trade, then they ought to disaffiliate themselves completely and align with another existing denomination. They shouldn’t meanwhile adopt a “wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing” approach to missionary activity.

It just isn’t Christian.

UPDATE: Turns out at least one of Christ Fellowship’s satellites, in West Kendall, does identify itself openly as Southern Baptist. My point still stands: one should not have to read the fine print to know what denomination one’s church is affiliated with.