The Rev. Rodney Albert, pastor of Hallsville Baptist Church near Columbia, is a rising star among the conservative leadership of the Missouri Baptist Convention, the state arm of the largest Protestant denomination in the country, the 16-million member Southern Baptist Convention.

As chairman of the state convention’s Christian Life Commission for the last five years Albert has been in the trenches of political battles over gay marriage, gambling and embryonic stem cell research.

Albert is a captivating preacher in the hell fire and brimstone tradition, and the Missouri Baptist Convention elected him to give the prestigious Annual Sermon on Tuesday at the organization’s yearly meeting, held over three days this week at the Tan-Tar-A Resort in Osage Beach.

In his sermon Albert addressed the sorry state of American culture. He spoke of random murder, lack of prayer in public schools, sexual deviance, anti-Christian bias and general moral chaos. “And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, we find out the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination is Hillary Clinton,” he told the crowd of 1,300 delegates. “Things are bad in America.”

In an interview afterwards, Albert talked presidential politics. Who will the conservative evangelical community end up supporting for president?

“We’re very concerned, as a religious people,” he said. “But obviously there’s a split in the evangelical camp about who to back. To me it’s unacceptable to vote for someone who will not represent my value system.”

For Albert, that means two choices. One would be a third-party candidate yet to be determined by conservative evangelicals. At the end of September, a group of influential conservative evangelicals led by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, threatened to support a third-party candidate if the GOP nominates a candidate who supports abortion rights.

“In the last couple of decades conservative Christians have had an idolatrous relationship with the Republican party,” said Albert. “We’ve relied more and more on the party as a true source of our hope. But my hope is in God, not in the Republican party…I’m open to a third party, but the fear, obviously, is that a third party would get us to Hillary.”

Another option, he said, was Gov. Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist preacher who has done well in recent straw polls. “Why not Huckabee? Because so many of us Christians take our cues from the world, and that worldly political slang word has cropped up with him: “electability,’” said Albert. “But if Christians get behind him — and I think Missouri Baptists are starting to — the grass roots movement for Huckabee could begin to swell. We have to go with someone we believe in, not someone who we have to hold our noses over.”

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