Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump raised doubts about the electorate’s palatability for rival Ben Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist beliefs, but Bible Belt voters insisted Thursday that the denomination to which the candidate belongs isn’t an issue.
As Mr. Carson made a campaign swing through Alabama, one of several Bible Belt states with Super Tuesday primaries March 1, the impact of his faith was tested. And religious leaders, conservative activists and political experts in the state said religion wouldn’t be an impediment to his run.
Mr. Trump is not alone in expressing unease with the religious beliefs of the famed neurosurgeon, though he’s one of the few who will do it publicly.
“I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about, I just don’t know about,” Mr. Trump said at a rally last month in Jacksonville, Florida. Mr. Trump identified himself as a Presbyterian, which he described as “down the middle of the road.”
He later denied that he was sending a signal to the party’s evangelical voters, who could view Seventh-day Adventists as out of the mainstream.
Seventh-day Adventists, the faith Mr. Carson was raised in and to which he committed himself at age 14, follow conventional conservative Christianity. But they differ from other Protestant churches in some significant ways.
They follow Jewish tenants such as observing the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in the imminent second coming of Christ and revere the prophetical writings of Ellen G. White, who co-founded the religion in 1863.
“Him being an Adventist is not going to be detrimental to him among Baptists or Methodists or evangelicals or whatever,” said Pastor Scott Weatherford of Vaughn Forest Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Montgomery, Alabama.
“His intelligence is paramount, and I believe [churchgoing voters] agree with most of his stances socially and ethically,” he said, adding that members of his congregation would consider Mr. Carson’s faith “pretty mainstream.”
Mr. Carson has been jockeying with Mr. Trump for the lead in the race. Both men have polled in the low 20s, with the next-closest competitor trailing them by double digits in most polls.
Mr. Carson’s religion also didn’t concern the state’s tea party voters.
“That has no bearing,” said Mark Scott, chairman of the Chilton County (Alabama) Tea Party. “We have plenty of Adventists around, Jehova’s Witnesses and everything else. Most people in Alabama don’t cross boundaries of religion — as far as your general religion, it’s ’live and let live’ as far as that goes.”
Chilton County is located in the center of the state between Birmingham and Montgomery.
William H. Stewart, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alabama, said that conservative and evangelical voters in the state would welcome Mr. Carson as a man of faith, regardless of his brand of Christianity.
“I don’t think conservative Christian evangelicals would quibble over the fact that Dr. Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist any more than they quibbled over Rick Santorum, a devout Roman Catholic, who won the most recent Alabama Republican presidential primary back in 2012,” he said.
It’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, a Mormon, finished third in the 2012 Alabama Republican primary, though he went on to capture the nomination and carry the state, with 60 percent of the vote in the general election against President Obama.
“I also think conservative Christian Republican voters in Alabama are glad to show that their opposition to President Obama and his policies has not been based on his ethnicity,” Mr. Stewart said of Mr. Carson, who, like Mr. Obama, is black.
At Prichard Preparatory School, a private elementary school in Mobile that was the first stop in a whirlwind campaign tour of the state, Mr. Carson wasn’t talking religion but values.
“When you go home today, I want you to be thinking about how can I make my mom or dad, or whoever is taking care of me, how can I make them happy,” Mr. Carson told the students, according to reports on WALA-TV. “For instance, clean your room up and, when they walk in, they’ll say, ’Whose room is this?’”
He told the children that school is about more than learning reading, writing and math.
“It’s also learning how to be a good person, a person who brings joy to other people, a person who, when they are there, can help make other people happy,” said Mr. Carson.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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