The Faith of our President-Elect
Here’s an excerpt from President-Elect Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani.
I’ve highlighted an intriguing response by Obama in bold/italics below:
FALSANI:
Do you think it’s wrong for people to want to know about a civic leader’s spirituality?
OBAMA:
I don’t’ think it’s wrong. I think that political leaders are subject to all sorts of vetting by the public, and this can be a component of that.
I think that I am disturbed by, let me put it this way: I think there is an enormous danger on the part of public figures to rationalize or justify their actions by claiming God’s mandate.
I think there is this tendency that I don’t think is healthy for public figures to wear religion on their sleeve as a means to insulate themselves from criticism, or dialogue with people who disagree with them.
FALSANI:
The conversation stopper, when you say you’re a Christian and leave it at that.
OBAMA:
Where do you move forward with that?
This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell.
FALSANI:
You don’t believe that?
OBAMA:
I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.
I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.
That’s just not part of my religious makeup.
Part of the reason I think it’s always difficult for public figures to talk about this is that the nature of politics is that you want to have everybody like you and project the best possible traits onto you. Oftentimes that’s by being as vague as possible, or appealing to the lowest commong denominators. The more specific and detailed you are on issues as personal and fundamental as your faith, the more potentially dangerous it is.
Face-Off at the Faith Forum
The following is a reproduction of the August 20 email edition of
850 WORDS OF RELEVANT: Face-Off at the Faith Forum
Rick Warren’s Southern California mega-church, Saddleback Church, has been a repository of surprises over the years. At his AIDS summit in 2006, Barak Obama was a featured speaker. In 2007, Hillary Clinton was. In 2008, Warren specifically invited gay fathers to attend father’s day church services and share a meal with the super-pastor. The stage was set to surprise once again on August 16 when, for the first time ever, the two presumptive Presidential nominees met at Saddleback to answer questions about faith and morality.
The goal of the nominees was no secret to anyone: capture the Christian vote that has traditionally gone Republican without reservation but in this election have remained undecided. With poll numbers running so tight, the religious vote could decide the election. If there were no votes to be gained by talking about faith, the candidates wouldn’t be doing it.
Questions centered on moral issues such as poverty and climate change, issues that didn’t seem to create much distance between the candidates. But things changed when Warren pressed them on the “big two”: abortion and same sex marriage.
When asked to define marriage, Obama appeared centrist. “It’s a union between a man and a woman,” he said. “For me as a Christian, it is a sacred union. God is in the mix.” Obama added that he does support civil unions for gay couples because civil rights should be afforded to others even if he doesn’t share their view. McCain played it safe and said that he would leave the decision up to individual States.
When asked when the candidates believed life began, McCain blurted out “conception” without hesitation. Obama seemed to spin things a little bit. While he said he supports Roe vs. Wade and has always been pro-choice, the goal should be to reduce the number of abortions in America.
“What I can do is say, are there ways we can work together to reduce unwanted pregnancies,” he said. Obama never answered the question.
