Former Vice President Mike Pence addressed Southern Baptists at a luncheon event focused on public service where he criticized President Joe Biden, questioned the longer term of the Republican Party and upheld faith as the reply for the country’s problems.
He spoke during a Tuesday luncheon held at a hotel across the road from the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention with Brent Leatherwood, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
After trumpeting his role within the Trump administration’s appointment of justices who “sent Roe versus Wade to the ash heap of history,” Pence made it clear that he has found nothing to understand concerning the current presidency.
“I’ve never voted for Joe Biden,” he said. “I am unable to consider a thing he’s done that I agree with. And I’ve known Joe Biden an extended time. And, I mean, there’s a giant debate over the president’s condition, ability to do the job. Let me just assure you, Joe Biden has at all times been that incorrect. I mean, that is not recent.”
Some of the audience, about 400 people dining on boxed lunches of turkey sandwiches, pasta salad and chocolate chip cookies, laughed, and much more applauded the overturning of the constitutional right to legal abortion within the U.S. two years ago.
Pence, who was drawn to the Republican Party throughout the Ronald Reagan era, said he’s focused on “traditional conservative values” and advocating for them through his Advancing American Freedom, a foundation he created in 2021. But he sees division in his political party.
“The influential men and ladies on this room have to know there’s also a really healthy debate inside my party about whether we’ll stay on the course of a powerful national defense of American leadership on the earth, of limited government and balanced budgets, traditional moral values, the best to life and an affirmation of non secular liberty and marriage,” he said, “or whether we’re going to start out to maneuver in one other direction.”
One of those divides, he said, is future laws about abortion at every level of U.S. political life.
“I truthfully think we’ve not come to the tip of the controversy over life: We’ve come to the tip of the start,” Pence said. “I feel the destiny of this nation is inextricably linked as to if we restore the sanctity of life to the middle of American law.”
Leatherwood asked Pence how he deals with personal attacks, including about decisions which have made headlines, reminiscent of to not dine alone with a girl not his wife.
Pence drew laughter again when he described then-President Donald Trump’s response to a news story about that non-public policy once they were together with his team within the Oval Office: “He goes, ‘Can you all imagine it? After all the things they said about me, they’re attacking Mike Pence for being faithful to his wife.'”
But Pence included a clarification for those in Tuesday’s audience who didn’t know the history of that alternative of private behaviour.
“It wasn’t Mike Pence’s rule: It’s the Billy Graham rule,” he said, referring to the famed evangelist. “When we got busy in public life, Karen and I sat down and just made some decisions about putting our marriage and our families first and that was considered one of them.”
Pence said he and Trump, however, may never agree on the choice Pence made to support the end result of the 2020 election — at the same time as election deniers attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, some threatening his life. But Pence said he focuses on the religion on which he relied then and now.
“I understand it’s God’s grace that saw us through that day,” he said.
Leatherwood asked Pence if he had any advice for approaching the upcoming election, as research has shown that the majority Americans don’t want a presidential rematch between Biden and Trump.
“If there was a time to return to that pulpit and tell your folks pray for America, it might be now,” the previous vice chairman said, adding that repentance can be needed.
He really helpful “calling our neighbours and friends, not only the people on the market that disagree with us openly, that do not embrace our faith in Jesus Christ, but I’m talking about including individuals who do and say let’s all examine our hearts and see the way it is that we are able to, in our own lives, have a change of heart that may encourage the nation.”
In the start and end of his remarks, Pence expressed his gratitude for those within the audience who’re leading and preaching to congregations across the country.
“I need you all to know the way grateful I’m for the role that you just play within the lives of families and communities that you just serve,” he said. “I’ll at all times imagine that the pulpits that you just speak behind are infinitely more priceless to the lifetime of this nation than any podium that I’ve ever had the privilege to face on.”
© Religion News Service
