That, I suspect, was the reason why Mr. Green went with “the story.” It provided him an opportunity to smear Congresswoman Bachmann and drive a wedge between two constituencies whose votes she has a strong chance to attract: conservative Evangelicals and observant Catholics. Understanding what Luther and his fellow Reformers (including John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and John Knox) truly meant by “Antichrist,” and how they employed it as a term of art, was the least of Mr. Green’s concerns.

If Mr. Green had cared about doing his homework, he would have known where to look. Granted, it would have involved real effort, more time than it takes to get a couple of money quotes from a few sources accessible on his iPad’s contact list. One resource he would have found illuminating is the book Building Unity: Ecumenical Dialogue with Roman Catholic Participating in the United States, edited by Jeffrey Gros and Joseph Burgess, and published by a Catholic press.

         Michele Bachmann, former Lutheran

Here’s a relevant passage from the reflections of the Lutheran participants (note omitted):

In considering the historic Lutheran position on the papacy, we have become very much aware that the early Reformers did not reject what we have called the “Petrine function,” but rather the concrete historical papacy as it confronted them in their day. In calling the pope the “antichrist,” the early Lutherans stood in a tradition that reached back into the eleventh century. Not only dissidents and heretics but even saints had called the bishop of Rome the “antichrist” when they wished to castigate his abuse of power.

There are, of course, many other important theological issues involved with the contemporary Lutherans who continue to affirm Luther’s judgment of the papacy. In order to appreciate and understand these issues – even if one winds up not finding them compelling – WELS  has published a nine-page account of the doctrine on its website that includes sizeable quotations from Luther himself.

Of course, as a Catholic I think that Luther was deeply mistaken. But I also understand that if you take theology seriously, as something with real cognitive content, then it will by its very nature exclude certain beliefs while entailing others. Thus, the Catholic Church affirms that Protestant denominations, like the Lutherans, are not real churches. That judgment inexorably follows from the Catholic belief in apostolic succession.

Not surprisingly, Baptists do not accept infant baptisms as legitimate, Judaism believes that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is unbiblical, Eastern Orthodoxy forbids its people from receiving the Eucharist at churches in communion with Rome, Muslims deny that Jesus is the Son of God, and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, “believes that the popish sacrifice of the mass is most abominably injurious to Christ’s one, only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of His elect.”

It is not clear what Mr. Green expects to find when he investigates the churches, synagogues, or mosques of political figures. In a nation of serious believers who are citizens of a government committed to religious freedom and other basic liberties, why does it surprise Mr. Green to find that differing religious points of view should arise and that the advocates of those views would issue doctrinal statements that are at points critical in nature?

Consequently, to lament serious religious disagreement among the citizenry – and to describe it in such a crude and uncharitable fashion, as does Mr. Green – is an implicit offense against the very constitutional freedoms that make such disagreements possible

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He tells the story of his journey from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again in his book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic(Brazos Press, 2009).  He blogs at Return to Rome.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org Catholic Thing