Lutherans want to get their theology right. Getting it right means that it cannot be too Catholic, which is not easy because Lutheranism is thoroughly Catholic in its Germanic and Scandinavian roots. For instance, having inherited the Mass, Lutherans are both suspicious of it and determined to get it right. Most Lutheran church services were the Mass without Holy Communion: stop before you get that far!
It was not unusual to meet determined, old Lutherans who rarely, if ever, had participated in Holy Communion. They were waiting until the last minute. Then they were going to confess their sins, and eat the bread and drink the wine, and die! Forgiven! They didn't want to get forgiven, live for five more years, accumulate five years worth of overt and covert sins, and have to stand before St. Peter with five years of tarnish.
You know how the Catholics were! They sinned every week, confessed nearly every week, got themselves forgiven, and went back to sinning! No respectable Lutheran wanted to live that kind of disrespectful life. Lutherans waited, hoping to show up at the Pearly Gates almost untarnished, but certainly not as serial repenters.
The Baptists, on the other hand, reveled in their sin and degradation. It was nearly impossible to be a Baptist preacher if you had not lost your way, preferably by drinking and engaging in almost explicitly detailed sins of the flesh, and finally come to Jesus. You had to celebrate your worthlessness, and be able to tell the exact moment you had been plucked up from the gutter and been saved! Of course, it happened that you might regress, from time to time, possibly with the organist, or John Barleycorn, but repentance made it all right. Big sins required grandiose repentance, but that was only right. Proportion is important.
I admire Newt Gingrich. He has the best of both worlds. Not the Lutheran world: that is too grim. I mean the Baptist and Catholic worlds. Newt was a Baptist, in fact, but now he is a Catholic. Old Newt has done the damnedest things, and he admits it. But now he has seen the light. Newt saw so much light that he not only confessed that he loved his country so much, and worked so hard at his job, that he did some shameful things regarding his first two marriages, for instance. But Newt is sorry. Newt is very, very sorry! He has married again, but this time he is a Catholic, where marriage is forever, quite often, and Newt has seen Jesus.
And you don't need to worry about any of those other sins and degradations of a political and social nature, either, because Newt is a new man. He is the first to admit how much he has changed. What chance does Mitt Romney have, who has never sinned, so far as we know? What does Mitt have to repent of? One man, one woman, one marriage, one health plan, one big bunch of happy kids?
That won't fly! The Tea Party Wing of the Republican Evangelical Church wants a sinner who has come to see the unspecified errors of his ways; someone who has found the Lord, and Callista, and Tiffany's.
Yes, sir, Newt is a changed man! We can sleep easy. Our country is in safe and sanctified hands.
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