by Larry Jones
Presidential candidates Barack Obama
and John McCain will share a stage – or is it a pulpit – when they
appear together at the Saddleback mega church in California’s Orange
County. Obama and McCain will be at a church sponsored “Civil Forum
on Leadership and Compassion” mc”d by Saddleback pastor Rick Warren.
Warren will pose all the questions to
Obama and Mccain in the 2 hr meeting, and says the setting will allow
for a “civil and thoughtful format”. Warren also says he “will
be raising questions in these four areas beyond what political reporters
typically ask. This includes pressing issues that are bridging divides
in our nation, such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate and human rights.”
By the flip of a coin Barack Obama will
go first at the Forum on Leadership and Compassion on August 16, where
he will “preach his gospel of condoms.” That comment is a
swipe at the presumed Democratic candidate by Kevin McCullough on his
radio show for James Dobson’s far-right wing Family Research Council.
The
Values Voters group on the religious right fear that Warren is one-upping
them in getting the limelight, especially one month before their annual
Values Voters Summit in Washington, hence such snide comments as the
one by McCullough. Warren is the author of the best selling “The
Purpose Driven Life,” which has sold over 30 million copies, and which
is centered on how God can fill your life with purpose if you just follow
the outline in his book. Many think of Warren as a religious
centrist, because his sermons do not come off as the hellfire and brimstone
Bible pounding of many other evangelical preachers. But make no
mistake about it; he is a full-on Fundamentalist with a capital F.
Here are some of the main points in Saddleback’s
Statement of Beliefs:
* The Bible is God’s perfect guidebook for living. [That
sounds so much nicer that calling it God’s literal word without error,
including all the killing and other horrors.]
* Nothing in creation “just happened,” God made it all. [That’s
a short sum-up of the church’s anti-evolution position.]
* Heaven and hell are real places. Death is a beginning, not the
end. [So you better start living “the purpose driven life before
it’s too late.]
* Jesus is coming again. [There’s that Second Coming myth that
fundamentalists love to talk and shout about.]
Warren has spun off a tax-exempt organization
called Saddleback Civil Forum to sponsor events that deal with political
issues, in an attempt to avoid the separation of church and state issue.
The Obama/McCain forum is co-sponsored by Faith in Public Life, a progressive
religious group which seeks to build coalitions among faith based organizations
to address issues of social justice. Some religious liberals fear
this joint sponsorship will give Warren a patina of liberalism which
he certainly does not deserve. Along with his fundamentalist bona
fides listed above, he opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and believes
that those among us who are agnostics or atheists are going to hell.
Unfortunately, Obama, along with all
his other recent moves as he lurches toward the right, has touted Warren
as a great Christian leader. He is perhaps lured toward Warren
because the minister cites major world problems – spiritual emptiness,
self-serving leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, and rampant
illiteracy. But Warren’s solution to such issues is not basic
and structural change or even any quasi-reforms that Obama might sponsor
either as senator or president. No, Warren says that all these
problems “prevent masses of people from knowing the saving grace of
a loving God who sent his son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins allowing
us eternal hope and security.” And he further says that “there
is no organization or government that can effectively eradicate these
giants. The only successful solution is the global church of Jesus
Christ.”
It’s not clear why Obama would even
want to go to Warren’s forum when the current numbers show that Catholics
and mainline Protestants are the swing voters this year, not evangelicals.
Maybe it’s Warren’s Hawaiian shirts.
But it’s clear why McCain wants to
go there; because Warren has made his Bush-type politics pretty clear.
During the 1994 campaign, he wrote to his church members about how the
Supreme Court members are the ones who decide on such issues as abortions,
gay marriages, human cloning, removing “under God” from the flag
pledge and “in God we trust” from our money. Then, in a devious
way and without actually endorsing Bush, he wrote to his congregants:
“President Bush and Sen. Kerry have VERY different opinions about
the type of people who should become Supreme Court Justices.”
While Warren basks in the glow of rave
reviews by everyone from Time magazine to The Economist, his less than
charming agenda, despite his raising money for AIDs victims and the
poor, is solidly on the far right of the religious spectrum. However,
it will be interesting to see what comes out of this months” forum
with the two presumed presidential candidates. It is safe to say
that they each will talk for an hour regarding all the things they have
been talking about endlessly ever since the primaries ended.
None of it will get to the heart of the
matter – that voting for either is not going to bring an end to the
horrors of two, and now possibly three, wars, the loss of civil liberties,
the endless torture of people, many of whom are innocent, and rapid
moves toward a fundamentalist theocracy. It is certainly true
that there are two roads to the future: the hell promised by politicians
and their fanatical religious friends or the promise of bringing it
all down.
Larry Jones is a long time political
activist and former United Church of Christ minister who lives in Honolulu.