Rubio campaign ad touts faith in Iowa

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2016/01/08/rubio-campaign-ad-touts-faith-in-iowa/

Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio rolled out a new campaign commercial in Iowa that seeks to highlight his Christian faith.

“Our goal is eternity, the ability to live alongside our Creator for all time. To accept the free gift of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ,” Rubio says in the 30-second video entitled “Faith.”

“The struggle on a daily basis as a Christian is to remind ourselves of this. The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan,” the Florida Senator says, concluding: “To me, I try to allow that to influence me in everything that I do.”

The ad will air on Iowa broadcast and cable television channels over the weekend, USA Today reported Thursday. Rubio lags behind Texas Senator Ted Cruz and New York billionaire Donald Trump in the latest Iowa polls, according to RealClearPolitics.com averages through Dec. 21. Rubio averaged about 11 percent support while Cruz had almost 32 percent and Trump had almost 28 percent.

Iowa holds the first contest of the 2016 presidential primary season with party caucuses set for Feb. 1.

In the past, Rubio has discussed publicly his complex faith journey. In an interview with Christianity Today in 2012, the son of Cuban immigrants described how he was raised in a Roman Catholic family who dabbled with Mormonism for a brief period during his childhood before returning to Catholicism.

Although he attended a Baptist church for a period in the early 2000s with his family, Rubio currently describes himself as adhering to Catholic doctrine although occasionally he attends his family’s Baptist church.

Contact Kara Bettis at [email protected] or on Twitter @karabettis.