Associated Baptist Press - 2/6/2008

Associated Baptist Press

February 6, 2008 (8-16)

IN THIS ISSUE:


Deadly Super Tuesday storms devastate Union University
After Super Tuesday, parties, religious voters still divided



Deadly Super Tuesday storms
devastate Union University

By ABP staff


JACKSON, Tenn. (ABP) -- Baptist-affiliated Union University was one of the hardest-hit spots as deadly tornadoes raked the Mid-South Feb. 5 -- the same day as Mardi Gras celebrations and the “Super Tuesday” primary elections.

Among those killed was Fountaine Bayer, a member of First Church of Clinton, Ark. Her son and daughter-in-law, John and Brenda Bayer, are International Mission Board missionaries in Mexico. John's sister-in-law, Sharon Ann Bayer of Clinton, was injured in the storm and was in surgery Feb. 6 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital in Little Rock, Ark.

The Tennessee Baptist Convention-related school’s campus sustained extensive damage as an evening tornado tore across the north side of Jackson, Tenn. The city of about 65,000 is located midway between Memphis and Nashville.

The Jackson Sun reported Feb. 6 that emergency workers rescued 13 students trapped in a demolished dormitory complex.

Union spokesman Tim Ellsworth told the paper that 51 students were transported to the hospital. While nine students had serious injuries, none of the injuries were life-threatening, he said. In an interview posted Feb. 6 on the website of local television station WBBJ, Ellsworth said school officials had confirmed that all of the seriously injured students “are going to be fine.”

However, he added, the campus “really looks like a bomb went off here.” He told the Baptist and Reflector, the state convention’s newspaper, that the university community was still in a state of shock the morning after the storm -- but also a state of relief.

“It is incredible that no one has been killed,” he said.

Union’s two major residential complexes were mostly destroyed, and the roof was blown off one of the main academic buildings. That left the building flooded, according to Ellsworth.

Local churches, as well as several of Union’s peer institutions, have offered their resources to the stricken campus. Samford University, an Alabama Baptist school located in Birmingham, has set up a fund to assist with relief and rebuilding efforts. Officials at Rhodes College, a Presbyterian school in Memphis, Tenn., have offered their assistance. Rhodes President William Troutt had previously led Belmont University, a Tennessee Baptist school in Nashville.

Union University President David Dockery, in a Feb. 6 press conference, said the college received $2.6 million worth of damage from a tornado in 2002. The Feb. 5 storm was “15 times worse than that,” he said.

Ellsworth said classes have been canceled and will not resume before Feb. 18. “It will be a long time before the campus will be fully operational,” he said.

Storm victims off Union’s campus were not so fortunate. The same tornado killed two elderly residents in rural parts of Madison County, according to a Feb. 6 report in the Jackson paper.

And dozens of other tornadoes killed residents across the lower Mississippi Valley. As of midday Feb. 6, the Associated Press reported that 48 people had been confirmed dead in four states: 24 in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, seven in Kentucky and four in Alabama. The National Weather service received reports of 60 tornadoes in the region between the afternoon of Feb. 5 and the morning of Feb. 6.

That makes the event the deadliest tornado outbreak -- and one of the largest -- in more than 20 years. The death toll is even higher than the May 3, 1999, outbreak famous for a massive tornado that laid waste to large sections of Oklahoma City.

In Arkansas, the towns of Clinton and Atkins reportedly sustained direct hits from storms. Charlie Warren, editor of the Arkansas Baptist News, said Feb. 6 that he had not yet confirmed reports of the storms directly affecting any Arkansas Baptist congregations or institutions. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that one storm destroyed a Baptist church in rural Pope County, but Warren said that congregation is not affiliated with the state convention.

He said Arkansas Baptist disaster-relief officials were meeting that morning to coordinate information and begin formulating a response.

Several presidential candidates, in delivering victory speeches after the largest day of presidential primaries in the nation’s history, asked supporters to pray for the storm’s victims. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee both have strong ties to Arkansas, one of the hardest-hit states. Clinton’s Democratic rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, also asked supporters to pray for those affected by the bad weather.

President Bush took a moment during a brief Feb. 6 appearance at the Department of Agriculture to mention the storms’ toll and promise federal help. “Prayers can help, and so can the government,” Bush said. “I do want the people in those states to know that the American people stand with them.”

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-- Compiled by Lonnie Wilkey of the Baptist and Reflector and Robert Marus of Associated Baptist Press. ABP will update this story as more information becomes available.




After Super Tuesday, parties,
religious voters still divided

By Robert Marus


WASHINGTON (ABP) -- About the only thing the Feb. 5 “Super Tuesday” primaries made clear is that religious voters are as conflicted as the general electorate over who the next president should be.

By the afternoon of Feb. 6, with results in from almost all of the states that held Republican and Democratic contests on the largest primary day in American history, neither party had a candidate with a prohibitive lead in delegates.

Moreover, according to exit-poll data, no GOP candidate had a clear advantage among self-described evangelical voters, and no Democrat had a clear advantage among those who attend religious services the most frequently.

The exit pollsters -- continuing a policy that some evangelicals have criticized -- did not ask Democratic voters if they consider themselves evangelical or born-again Christians.

Looking at nationwide poll numbers for Republican primary voters and caucus-goers, those who identified as evangelical or born again only very narrowly favored former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee over his rivals, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Huckabee -- a Southern Baptist pastor before he entered secular politics -- got 34 percent of the evangelical vote. But Romney -- a Mormon who has reversed his previous moderate positions on abortion and gay rights -- got 31 percent. McCain -- who generally has a conservative voting record on social issues but has had an uneasy relationship with Religious Right leaders -- garnered 29 percent of evangelicals.

“The whole story on the Republican side from page one is the story of a fractured party that can’t figure out what it is anymore,” said Laura Olson, a Clemson University political-science professor and expert on religious conservatives. “I think all of these candidates … each one, you can say, is the candidate of a different [GOP] faction in a lot of ways.”

In comments posted on Christianity Today magazine’s Liveblog site, one of the nation’s foremost experts on evangelicals agreed. “The evangelical community does seem to be divided. The fact that Gov. Huckabee and McCain have done well among evangelicals suggests the evangelical community is open to a broader agenda than they have been in the past,” John Green, of the University of Akron and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said. “One conclusion that one could draw is a lot [of] evangelicals are ready to move beyond President Bush. They’re ready to move on to a more moderate economic policy and a different foreign policy.”

Olson said the continued division in the Republican Party is partially the result of the growth and maturation of the politically active evangelical movement in the United States in the last decade.

“As a result of that, it’s a lot more difficult for any politician … to rally people who are in this case evangelical Protestants around any one candidate, cause or political party,” she suggested. “In a way, the Religious Right … to an extent, maybe, they’re a victim of their own success.”

Whether significant numbers of centrist or moderate evangelicals defect to a Democratic candidate remains to be seen. Olson, Green and other analysts have said that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, in particular, may appeal to younger and more progressive Christians.

Obama -- a Congregationalist who has spoken about his adult conversion experience -- did not do as consistently well among frequent churchgoers as he has in previous primaries. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton -- a lifelong Methodist and active participant in secretive congressional Bible studies -- showed significant strength among Catholics, especially in heavily Hispanic states.

Clinton’s campaign liaison to religious groups, Burns Strider, sent an e-mail to reporters Feb. 6 pointing out an analysis by the website CatholicDemocrats.org. It noted Clinton’s strength among Catholic voters, including her overwhelming victory among Catholics in delegate-rich (and Latino-rich) California.

“A big part of Sen. Clinton's strength in California among Catholics was clearly her appeal to Latino Democrats, who constituted 25 percent of the voters in California,” the analysis said. “They favored Sen. Clinton by nearly [a] three-to-one [margin] over Sen. Obama, who performed more strongly among college-educated and wealthier Democrats. Sen. Obama did somewhat better among Latino voters in his home state of Illinois, beating Sen. Clinton 58 percent to 41 percent in exit polling. But despite winning Illinois [by a] two-to-one [margin], his polling among Catholics was a draw with Sen. Clinton there.”

The website also noted that Clinton beat Obama handily among Catholics in heavily Catholic Massachusetts, which helped her win the commonwealth even though its top three Democratic officeholders endorsed Obama.

“Broadly speaking, the two Democrats are finding that their candidacies appeal to both frequent church attenders of all faiths and also to those who attend less often,” it said. “But Senator Clinton's edge among older white women, who constitute an increasing percentage of church-attending Catholics, and among white men may be a big part of why she is winning the Catholic Democratic vote overall so far.”

On the Republican side, Huckabee surprised some pundits by winning a string of Southern states on the strength of their large evangelical GOP electorates. However, in states where evangelicals do not make up an overwhelming proportion of Republicans, evangelical voters tended to mirror the choices of their non-evangelical neighbors.

For instance, Huckabee came in third among evangelical Republican voters in McCain’s and Romney’s home states. He came in last among his fellow evangelicals in California, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.

The apparent lack of focus among evangelicals may point to the disintegration of any particular evangelical identity, writer Madison Trammel pointed out on the Christianity Today blog.

“If evangelicals can't be counted on to vote together, are they worth targeting at all?” Trammel wrote. “If conservative, white, male evangelicals vote just like other conservative white males, does it matter that they're evangelicals? If urban, progressive evangelicals vote just like other urban liberals, does their religious affiliation need to be considered?

“Depending on how you look at it, the story of Election 2008 may be the maturing of the evangelical vote -- or the increasing irrelevance of it.”

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