Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson, who has based his campaign on appealing to conservative voters, said he isn't a regular churchgoer and doesn't plan to speak about his religion on the stump.
Thompson, in his first campaign stop in South Carolina, told a crowd of about 500 Republicans yesterday that he gained his values from ``sitting around the kitchen table'' with his parents and ``the good Church of Christ.''
Talking to reporters later, Thompson, a former Tennessee senator, said his church attendance ``varies.''
``I attend church when I'm in Tennessee. I'm in McLean right now,'' he said referring to the Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., where he lives. ``I don't attend regularly when I'm up there.''
Thompson said he usually attends church when visiting his mother in Tennessee and isn't a member of any church in the Washington area.
Thompson's remarks may not play well with religious voters who represent a sizable segment of the Republican Party and whose support he has been courting, portraying himself as a ``common sense conservative.'' President George W. Bush received 78 percent of the evangelical Christian vote in 2004 while Democrat John Kerry got 21 percent of that vote, according to the Pew Research Center.
I don't know what to say here about the poor GOP choices that the Religious Right is stuck with. For the top Republican presidential candidates, they have a choice between one Mormon, one pro-abortion New York mayor, one pandering-self-serving hypocritical senator, and one non-churchgoing former actor. And the one, true religious conservative, Senator Sam Brownback, is sitting at seventh place in the GOP presidential polls.
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