The Tuesday night before this past Thanksgiving, at a dinner in a small ballroom at the Holiday Inn at the airport in Des Moines, one of the 50 or so pastors who had come to listen to Marco Rubio stood up to ask him a question. Kenney Linhart, the broad-built boss of a nearby church called The Kathedral, had read about the complicated religious history of the Florida senator and Republican presidential hopeful. He needed a straight answer.
“You’re in a room full of Christians,” Linhart said, wrapping his hand around the hand of the man holding the microphone, “so you mentioned God, and you mentioned the king of kings, but tell us about your experience with the Lord Jesus Christ, using that name.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rubio, dressed in a dark suit and a blue tie, standing behind an unfussy hotel lectern.
Rubio has perhaps the most unusual personal religious story of anyone on the campaign trail. Given the audience, this might have been an opportunity for evasion, or to cherrypick parts of his “faith journey” that would appeal most to evangelicals. Instead, Rubio launched into a virtuoso, 10-minute-long, let-me-at-it telling of his circuitous faith—Catholicism to Mormonism back to Catholicism to a Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated evangelical megachurch and finally back to Catholicism—as well as passionate and particular evidence of the depth of his knowledge of the Bible. “Now I sound like the preacher,” a smiling Rubio said toward the end.
His answer was a big deal. It was watched, shared and talked about in churches around Iowa and among pastors around the country, and Linhart, who had supported Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal before that candidacy withered, heard what he needed to hear. He is now backing Rubio. “I make it clear to my congregation: ‘I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but this is who I’m supporting,’” he said later when we talked on the phone.
For the staunchly Protestant evangelicals, though, who form a core component of the Iowa primary electorate, that answer also contained a poison pill. “I’m fully, theologically, doctrinally aligned with the Roman Catholic Church,” Rubio had said—and for people like Joe Brown, the influential leader of the Marion Avenue Baptist Church in rural Washington in the southeastern part of the state, that no-wiggle-room declaration was a deal-breaker. “Most pastors and evangelicals do not believe you can be a Catholic and be an evangelical at the same time,” Brown told me. He is energetic in his support for Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Rubio rival.
The main knock on Rubio as a candidate is his slipperiness on issues like immigration. And when he talks in speeches, debates and town halls, he can come off polished to the point of rehearsed. His religion is an exception. When he talks about his faith, he sounds off-the-cuff sincere. Rubio pitches himself, too, as the most 21st-century candidate, and he means generationally (he is only 44) and demographically (the child of two Cuban immigrants, he would be the first Hispanic president)—but with Americans increasingly moving from church to church, blurring long-drawn lines between denominations, the single-most 21st-century thing about him might be his religious path.
And yet in national polls, and in polls in Iowa, Rubio trails not only Cruz, the doctrinaire son of a Baptist pastor, but Donald Trump, the twice-divorced former casino tycoon who has said he doesn’t ask for forgiveness for his sins and who totes a Bible as a prop.
The problem here in Iowa, if it is a problem, with the kick-off caucuses a week and a half away, is not so much that Rubio is pandering for the votes of evangelicals. Or that he’s insufficiently authentic on this front. It’s that he’s entirely authentic. And it isn’t that he hasn’t “picked” a religion and stuck with it. For some, it’s that he has—and that he “picked” wrong. In this state that skews conservative, white and old, the question is paramount, but it’s no less crucial across the rest of the country, where politics and religion combine in shifting, consequential ways.
Rubio, who has never lost an election, is manifestly ambitious, a baby-faced, step-skipping climber ever since he got on the city commission of the tiny municipality of West Miami when he was 26 years old. His religious life, on the other hand, stands apart. He has been a seeker and a searcher. He has struggled always, he has said, to balance what he wants in this life with what he wants from the next. But Rubio wants to be saved more than he wants to be president. And the former could cost him the latter.
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He grew up west of Miami’s Little Havana down the street from a Catholic church where he was baptized and went to Mass with his mother, after which, he has said, he sometimes would wrap himself in a sheet and “play priest” by mimicking the services.
When his family moved to North Las Vegas, in 1979, they went to a Mormon church because of one of his aunts, and “I immersed myself in LDS theology,” Rubio wrote in his memoir “and understood it as well as an eight-year-old mind can.” His father didn’t much like the Mormon religion because of its bans on smoking (he loved cigars) and drinking (he worked as a bartender) and caffeine (Cuban coffee!). His mother, meanwhile, sought friends and shared values more than a particular theology or ideology.
In An American Son, Rubio portrayed himself, even as a boy and pre-teen, as the most devout member of his family. He checked out from his school library books about religion. From his parents, he got for a Christmas gift a set of World Book encyclopedias, and he flipped to the pages about Roman Catholicism. He watched the papal Easter Mass on television and decided he wanted to be Catholic again.
The Rubios left their Mormon church, “mostly at my instigation,” he wrote, and their return to Catholicism “had really just been my decision.” He got his parents to enroll him in CCD, the children’s education program of the Roman Catholic Church.
“Football and religion. Those were his things,” one of his cousins told Manuel Roig-Franzia for his book The Rise of Marco Rubio.
He was married, on October, 17, 1998, in a Catholic church, the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables, Florida.
The start of his political life, though, coincided with a decline in his religious life. He got “busy,” and he got “lazy,” he has said, and “lapsed considerably in my spiritual responsibilities to my family,” he wrote in An American Son. Up in Tallahassee, after Rubio was elected to the state legislature, he focused on achieving increased prominence and power; down in Miami, his wife filled a vacuum by taking their children to Christ Fellowship, Baptist, charismatic and evangelical. Rubio followed. By 2003, he has said, Christ Fellowship was their regular church, their “church home.”
But in 2004 and 2005, as he positioned himself to be the state Speaker of the House, he returned to Catholicism. He “yearned” for his “roots.” He went to Mass every morning. He subscribed to the Catholic publication Magnificat. He “craved, literally,” he would write, “the Most Blessed Sacrament, Holy Communion, the sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven.” He liked “the contemporary gospel message,” the simplicity of the focus on the scriptures, of Christ Fellowship—but what he really wanted, and needed, he thought, was “the actual body and blood of Jesus.”
His period of toggling between denominations was over. So was any ambivalence about his faith.
Just listen to his last speech as the speaker of the Florida House.
This was in May of 2008. “Let me finish with one more thought, and this is just the truth, and I hope no one gets offended—no one should,” Rubio said. “And that is this.” He took a sip of ice water from a styrofoam cup, seeming to gird himself. With Rubio now seeking the Oval Office, it’s odd, perhaps, to think that this might have been his last statement as a politician. All he knew for sure then was that term limits meant he was headed home to Miami to be a lawyer. As a public figure, in a public sphere, Rubio wanted to get this out.
“God is real!” he said.
His voice quaked with emotion. He used his right index finger to point around the room at his fellow lawmakers.
“God is real,” he said again. “I don’t care what courts across the country say.” Was he about to cry? “I don’t care what laws we pass. God is real! You can’t pass a court ruling that’s going to keep God out of this building. You can’t.”
A year and a half later, when he was running for U.S. Senate, so effectively he chased Charlie Crist from the Republican Party, Rubio talked to a reporter for CatholicAdvocate.com. Roe v. Wade, he said, “is morally and constitutionally wrong and should be overturned,” and “marriage is between a man and woman.” He promised he was “not going to change with the polls or the times.”
With success came scrutiny, and an interesting paradox: As his faith got more specific and intense, reporters and voters had more questions and doubts.
Rubio was described in a story in WORLD Magazine, a Christian publication, as “a Roman Catholic whose family has spent the last six years attending a Miami-area nondenominational church.”
The morning of Election Day in 2010, he went to Mass in Coral Gables, and that evening, in his victory speech, he said, “Let me begin tonight by acknowledging a simple but profound truth: We are all children of a powerful and great God.”
A Catholic Florida State law student and blogger named Eric Giunta wondered, though: Was Rubio trying “to court both the Catholic and the evangelical votes?” He added: “Catholics do not like to hear that one of their political heroes is a defector from their religion, and Evangelicals (especially Southern Baptists) would not be too happy to hear that their hero is an idol-worshiper (i.e., a Catholic).”
Eric Geiger, at the time the executive pastor of Christ Fellowship, told the New York Times Rubio still came “very regularly to worship service” at the church, to which from 2005 to 2008 he donated $50,000.
A headline in the National Catholic Reporter inquired: “Is Senator-Elect Marco Rubio a Catholic?”
What was he?
***
People in the context of politics were asking a question that in some sense missed the larger point. Rubio in this respect actually embodied national trends.
The Pew Research Center last year published an exhaustive study of religion in America. One of its primary findings: “Switching religions is a common occurrence in the United States.” The report cited “a remarkable degree of churn in the U.S. religious landscape.”
“This sort of religious practice is becoming more common due to increasing interfaith marriages, geographic mobility and declining brand loyalty among denominations,” John C. Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, told me.
Rubio, said Denny Burk, the head of the Center for Gospel and Culture in Louisville, is “not unlike many Americans—who, over the course of their lives, have more than one affiliation with a church or denomination.”
“People intermarry, people change jobs, people move around the country, people change from man to woman,” R.R. Reno, a former professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University who now is the editor of First Things magazine. “The same fluidity is present in the religious world as well.”
In this respect, said Thomas S. Kidd, the associate director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and a member of Rubio’s religious liberty advisory board, Rubio “represents a typical religious model of 21st-century America.”
Denominational distinctions aside, said Eric Teetsel, Rubio’s campaign’s faith outreach director, Rubio “will make decisions consistent with a Christian worldview informed by the Bible and guided by prayer.”
In his 2012 interview with Christianity Today, he said, “I’ve never criticized anyone for having their faith influence their public policy decisions. If your faith is real, burning inside of you, it’s going to influence the way you view everything.” In his speech at that summer’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, he said, ‘Faith in our creator is the most important American value of all.”
In 2013, when Time put Rubio on its cover, calling him “The Republican Savior,” he had a ready response. “There’s only one savior,” Rubio tweeted, “and it is not me.”
And last August, in a conversation with Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Rubio said, “People that stand for the idea that you should be able to abort a child at any stage in the pregnancy, they’re the extremists.” He added that Christians “are called to influence the culture around us.”
“Rubio isn’t a religious political panderer—he’s a 21st-century Evangelical Catholic,” Patricia Miller wrote in October on religiondispatches.org.
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So in Iowa just before Thanksgiving, from behind the lectern at the hotel at the airport in Des Moines, Rubio made his case to those pastors.
“I think too many Catholics don’t fully understand their faith, and the result is I didn’t learn about the Catholic Church until I went to a non-Catholic church,” he said, “and became infused in the Bible and became infused in the written word of God, and then and only then did the liturgy of the church start even making sense. I started to begin to understand the richness of the church.”
His relationship with Jesus Christ? “God became a man, came down to Earth, and died for our sins,” he said.
Why go to Mass but nonetheless maintain that affiliation with Christ Fellowship? “Because they preach from the same Bible.”
As for the implicit question of whether or not that’s even OK? “I think one of the amazing things that’s happened over the last 15 years, for a lot of different reasons, is some of the denominational divisions in America have fallen away as more and more believers recognize that we are all facing a common challenge.”
I wanted to know whether the pastors bought it. I called around to those who had been at the dinner or had watched the footage from the Christian Broadcasting Network. Iowa as a first electoral challenge is tricky, in part because the evangelical vote is no monolith, and different pastors have different beliefs, and their determinations aren't just about religious dogma.
The pastors I talked to spoke a good bit about Rubio’s one-time willingness to work on immigration reform as part of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight.” “Huge red flag,” said Spencer Keroff, the pastor at the First Church of the Open Bible in Des Moines. “I know we have to take some immigrants,” added Chris Tjapkes, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Perry, “but we have too many people in the country now who aren’t working.”
They spoke about his denominational drift.
“It is quite a spiritual journey, which he’s certainly entitled to,” said Darran Whiting, the pro-Cruz pastor at Liberty Baptist Church in Marion—before adding: “It’s not something I relate to.”
They spoke about his Catholicism.
“The Roman Catholic Church does not teach salvation by grace through faith,” said Caleb Garraway, an evangelist in eastern Iowa and also a Cruz backer. “Am I trying to say Marco Rubio is not saved? I have no idea. I hope the man is.”
“I would not say anything derogatory about Catholics, but Marco Rubio is very open that he is part of the Catholic Church,” said Brown, the Marion Avenue Baptist pastor, who has spearheaded the effort to get pastors in all 99 of Iowa’s counties to endorse Cruz. “When you say you’re doctrinally aligned with the Catholic Church, it really is contrary to what most evangelicals in Iowa believe.”
Royce Phillips, the pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Coralville, told me Rubio’s answer in Des Moines surprised him and impressed him—“he seemed genuine,” he said—but that he remains uncommitted. “I’d prefer a Baptist president,” he explained.
“I would say,” Wayne Almlie, the pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Des Moines, told me, “most of my Christian friends do support Ted Cruz.”
“It’s not so much what’s wrong with Marco Rubio—it’s what’s right about Ted Cruz,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the president of the Iowa-based Family Leader, a social conservative organization.
It’s a state of some 3 million people. More than 92 percent of them are white. Pew Research Center statistics say 53 percent of them say religion is “very important” and 51 percent of them say they read the Bible “seldom” or “never.” Two of every three people in Iowa don’t believe in evolution.
From November to December to January, based on Quinnipiac polling, Rubio’s standing with “white born-again evangelicals” ticked up—but only from eight to 12 to 13 percent. His campaign made an ad called “Faith,” aimed squarely at Iowa’s evangelicals. “Our goal is eternity,” Rubio said into the camera, “the ability to live alongside our creator for all time, to accept the free gift of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ.”The free gift of salvation. “An evangelical dog whistle,” Miller, from religiondispatches.org, told me on the phone. “He’s fully aligned with the Catholic Church,” said Burk, from Louisville, “but he expresses himself in evangelical terms,” bilingual and not just because of his Spanish.
Still, though, he is trailing Cruz, by a lot—and Trump, too, who dishes out lines like these: “I even brought my Bible—the evangelicals, OK?” “I walked onto a stage with a Bible, everybody likes me better.”
I called Michael Cromartie, the vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and an expert on the intersection of evangelicals and civic life.
“It’s befuddling,” he told me. “I think I’m as puzzled as any Rubio adviser would be.”
This past Sunday, I went to church at Linhart’s Kathedral in Des Moines, not far from the city center. It’s an old building he and his congregation are fixing up. The backdrop for the service was some scaffolding, and the space smelled like fresh paint. The faces around the room showed a surprising amount of black and brown skin.
Linhart preached for more than an hour. He paused in the middle. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got Bernie Sanders, and you’ve got Hillary Clinton, and you’ve got Marco Rubio, and you’ve got Ted Cruz, and Donald …something. And you know what? They’re all good speakers. You’ve got to know what their relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ is like.
“I’m not going to tell you who to vote for,” he said. “God’s bigger than that. Amen?”
Two hours southeast, past truck stops, silos and so many peeled-paint barns in snow-crusted fields, I arrived for evening worship at Marion Avenue Baptist. It’s a brick fortress that sits on the main drag of a downtrodden town. Inside, in the pastor’s office, Brown had a big box of T-shirts that told people to “Choose Cruz.” He preached to his people to not “squander” their “responsibility” come the night of the caucuses. “I think everybody here knows who I’m caucusing for,” he said—adding quickly that they were free to support somebody else, “as long as it’s not Bernie Sanders.” People laughed.
“Amen,” somebody said.
***
The story of Rubio’s religious identity doesn’t lie in Iowa, though—it lies in Florida, in the two churches where his family regularly worships. Miami is this country’s most multicultural mishmash of a metropolitan area, a pan-American capital. Distinctions exist, but hard lines go soft in the heat, and it’s not unusual to pick and choose among churches.
For all Rubio's clarity about his theology, however, I found he has left some uncertainty in his trail: There are two very different sets of people here who believe Rubio is in their congregation.
The two churches Rubio and his family go to are separated by approximately four miles of strip malls and strip clubs and smoke shops and pawn shops and liquor stores and auto lots and an International House of Pancakes on car-clogged U.S. 1.
I spent a weekend plus a Monday morning going to eight services at St. Louis Catholic Church and Christ Fellowship.
The differences aren't just theological.
Theater seats versus wooden pews. Hands up, palms open, versus heads bowed, eyes closed. Candle flames versus stage lights, and bouncy, breathy Christian rock versus organ tunes. White robes versus skinny jeans.
At Christ Fellowship, with thousands in its flock, seven locations around the city and a lead pastor, Rick Blackwood, a compelling preacher whose sermons have advocated creationism, exorcisms and anti-gay beliefs?
“Awesome!” “Wow!” “What great singing!”
At St. Louis Catholic Church? The repetitive “Body of Christ.” The murmurs of restive children.
At Christ Fellowship, I heard Geiger—the former executive pastor, back to guest-preach—talk to the congregation, packed in, balcony, too, about two kinds of liars. He had a name for the second. “The second liar,” Geiger said, “minimizes the holiness of God by saying, ‘I don’t ever need forgiveness, I don’t have any sin, I’m a good person—I’m a good person.’ We had a presidential candidate, recently someone asked him, ‘Do you ever pray for forgiveness?’” For those who might not have known, he spelled it out. “Donald Trump. And he said, ‘No, I just try to make it right, I try to fix things’—which many people actually think: I can fix things, I can make things right, I can fix things myself.” No, he said. “You can’t fix things. You can’t fix things! Because God is holy, God is righteous—and you’re not.”
At St. Louis Catholic Church, I heard prayers for “sincere dialogue of men and women of different faiths and that it will produce fruits of peace and justice,” and for “the grace of the Holy Spirit to overcome divisions among Christians,” and for “understanding and respect for those whose culture, beliefs or traditions are different from our own.”
In both churches I talked to people who had no problem that Rubio and his family attend services at both churches. “I wouldn’t say it’s too unusual,” Matt Gutierrez told me at Christ Fellowship. “A lot of us do that,” Toni Mamert told me at St. Louis Catholic Church. “We practice our Catholic faith, but we can go for the word of God and study the word of God at another denomination.”
In both churches I talked to people who did. “I’d like to find one place, in my opinion,” Cole Peacock told me at Christ Fellowship. “I would never go to a Protestant church for my Sunday obligation. Only Mass,” Patricia Desbiens told me at St. Louis Catholic Church.
And in both churches I talked to people who didn’t know Rubio also went to another church.
“I wasn’t aware of that,” Javier Cruz said at St. Louis Catholic Church.
“I thought this was his church,” Pamela Clark said at Christ Fellowship.
After a service at Christ Fellowship, I talked with Sammy Flores, the church’s main campus pastor. Blackwood declined a request to talk about Rubio, but Flores told me he hadn’t seen him since he started running for president. He had seen his wife and children more recently, he said—Christmas Eve, maybe?
Rubio’s attendance is consistent at St. Louis Catholic Church. “He worships here,” the Rev. Dr. James Dugard, a deacon, told me. “He comes to Mass. If he’s in town, he’s here”—with his family, sometimes a little late, but seated in the center rear pew, present.
“There’s a fulfillment he gets from the charismatic side of the Protestant movement,” the Rev. Michael Garcia said after a St. Louis service, “but he also, I guess you could say more intellectually—he is a very intellectual person—he gets fulfillment here in the Catholic Church.”
What in particular, I asked, does Rubio get from the Catholic Church that he doesn’t at Christ Fellowship?
“Sacraments,” Garcia said.
“What greater gift can you offer but God Himself?”
***
This past Monday, the day Donald Trump at Liberty University referred tellingly to 2 Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” and assured the crowd his autobiography The Art of the Deal was a “deep, deep second to the Bible” on the list of the best books ever, Marco Rubio was hosting a town hall at the Waverly Country Club in Waverly, Iowa. Toward the end of the session, Rubio got a question from an atheist. Would he, the man wanted to know, be a pastor in chief or a commander in chief?
The question came off as an effort to make Rubio pick between the faith he has and the job he wants. It didn’t work. As he had in his farewell speech in Tallahassee and at the dinner with the pastors in Des Moines, he saw an opportunity and took it.
“I’m a Christian,” he said.
“I want to be very clear about something. Not only am I a Christian, and not only am I influenced by my faith, but it is the single greatest influence in my life. And from that I’ll never hide. And I’ll tell you why. Because I know that if I’m lucky, I get to live to be 85 or 90 … but I’m more interested in eternity, and the ability to live forever, with my creator—that you don’t believe in, but I do. And that’s what I aspire to more than anything else.”