Fred Thompson has claimed an endorsement from a group representing "forty million conservative Methodists across the U. S."
This is accoring to a Time magazine article from Monday.
The Baptist Center for Ethics has the full scoop in an article by Bob Allen:
Presidential candidate Fred Thompson spoke ministerially--a euphemism in preacher circles for inflating numbers from the pulpit--when he claimed endorsement by two men representing 40 million Wesleyans, according to a newspaper report.
Last week Thompson received endorsement from two leaders of the Wesleyan Center for Strategic Studies, ministers Phillip Knight and Benny Tate.
"I am honored and blessed to receive the endorsement of these two men who represent 40 million people around the nation from 42 different Wesleyan denominations," Thompson said at a Friday press conference at the State Capitol in Jackson, Miss.
The claim is also refuted in article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
But Knight and Tate never have been elected to lead the nation’s Wesleyans and Methodists, who number only 14. 2 million, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey. And the Congregational Methodist denomination, based in Florence, Miss., has only 26, 000-27, 000 members, Knight said in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Monday.
Jeff Sadosky, a spokesman for the Thompson campaign, said he couldn’t say whether Thompson was accurate when he claimed the men represented 40 million people.
"I’m not a religion expert," Sadosky said. "The numbers we used came from conversations with them." Knight conceded Monday that there aren’t 40 million Wesleyans and Methodists in the United States.
As this admission makes clear, one does not have to be a religion expert to know that this number is about four times larger than the total number of all Methodists in the U. S. How sloppy does this reveal the Thmpson campaign to be?
The vast majority of the approximately ten million Methodists in this country are members of the United Methodist Church. Here is more on this other tiny Methodist/Wesleyan group that endorsed Thompson, from the Baptist Center for Ethics:
The two men are president and vice president of the Congregational Methodist Church, a conservative Wesleyan denomination with a total membership of about 26,000. Three thousand of those are from a single congregation, Rock Springs Church in Milner, Ga., where vice president Tate is pastor. Most ministers in the group are trained at Wesley College in Florence, Miss., where the denomination's headquarters are housed.
Knight and Tate founded the Wesleyan Center for Strategic Studies in 2006. A Web site describes it as "a conservative group designed to give a voice to the Wesleyan-Arminians across America."
Perhaps most troubling is the unbelievably careless reporting by Time magazine. Robert Parham, director of the BCE commented:
"Not only did he grossly inflate the number of Wesleyans, but he misunderstands the nature of support coming basically from two guys and a computer," Parham said. "Thompson appears too lazy to do respectable homework to discern the difference between substantive and superficial Christian organizations."
"As for Time Magazine, its mistake is flat sad," Parham said. "Perhaps its political desk forgot that the magazine has a top flight religion desk. If political reporters would respect religion reporters, such wild errors would not be made."
Pathetic in every way - a perfect reflection of Fred Thompson and his campaign.