Marcia
Active Member
This was on the editorial pages of the Wash Post today:
http://tinyurl.com/ya967n
Message From A Megachurch
[SIZE=-1]By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; A29
[/SIZE]
American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California's Santa Ana Mountains.
When Rick Warren, one of the nation's most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.
For his part, Obama, the former community organizer from Chicago, showed why he is this moment's hottest commodity in 2008 presidential politics, even though he has not entered the race yet.
For a quarter-century since the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, white evangelical Christians have been widely seen as a Republican preserve. No one did a more comprehensive job of organizing them than President Bush, and he carried the white evangelical vote in 2004 over John Kerry by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1. Many of the most politically active evangelical leaders have insisted that the morally freighted social issues -- abortion, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage -- took priority over all questions.
...But Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS.
....He is not building a new denomination. He is building a new network, and it's powerful. Warren and his wife, Kay, have made alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa one of the central components of their mission.
....But when the other invitee turned out to be Obama, parts of the old evangelical political apparatus went after Warren as a heretic. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, declared that Obama's views on abortion -- Obama is pro-choice -- represented "the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality" and insisted that Warren had no business inviting him to Saddleback.
Warren's church issued a statement reaffirming its strong opposition to abortion, but Warren did not back down. Indeed, he seemed to revel in rejecting the old evangelical political model. "I'm a pastor, not a politician," Warren told ABC News. "People always say, 'Rick, are you right wing or left wing?' I say 'I'm for the whole bird.' "
. . . . That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in "the whole bird." In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.
One more thing: If you read Obama's speech, you'll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is Hussein.
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http://tinyurl.com/ya967n
Message From A Megachurch
[SIZE=-1]By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; A29
[/SIZE]
American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California's Santa Ana Mountains.
When Rick Warren, one of the nation's most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.
For his part, Obama, the former community organizer from Chicago, showed why he is this moment's hottest commodity in 2008 presidential politics, even though he has not entered the race yet.
For a quarter-century since the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, white evangelical Christians have been widely seen as a Republican preserve. No one did a more comprehensive job of organizing them than President Bush, and he carried the white evangelical vote in 2004 over John Kerry by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1. Many of the most politically active evangelical leaders have insisted that the morally freighted social issues -- abortion, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage -- took priority over all questions.
...But Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS.
....He is not building a new denomination. He is building a new network, and it's powerful. Warren and his wife, Kay, have made alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa one of the central components of their mission.
....But when the other invitee turned out to be Obama, parts of the old evangelical political apparatus went after Warren as a heretic. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, declared that Obama's views on abortion -- Obama is pro-choice -- represented "the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality" and insisted that Warren had no business inviting him to Saddleback.
Warren's church issued a statement reaffirming its strong opposition to abortion, but Warren did not back down. Indeed, he seemed to revel in rejecting the old evangelical political model. "I'm a pastor, not a politician," Warren told ABC News. "People always say, 'Rick, are you right wing or left wing?' I say 'I'm for the whole bird.' "
. . . . That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in "the whole bird." In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.
One more thing: If you read Obama's speech, you'll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is Hussein.
===============MORE================
