When political leaders try to be ministers instead of political leaders, it lets nasty rightwing ministers like Rick Warren play (theocratic) politics

Dan Froomkin's description of President Obama's response to the attempted assassination of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last year provided a model for the pious but empty speech he gave on Friday on the Aurora shooting. His Republican challenger Willard "Mitt" Romney was even more pious and even more vapid. Froomkin ('Batman' Shooting: Gun Lobby Counts On Short Attention Span Huffington Post 07/20/2012)

President Barack Obama called for a national dialogue, but didn't lead one. Gun-control Democrats proposed banning high-capacity clips, like the ones Giffords' shooter used, but their bills went nowhere.

The gunman who opened fire in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater Friday morning, shooting 71 people and killing 12, is said to have been armed with two handguns, a shotgun and an assault-style rifle, some of which were presumably equipped with high-capacity clips. "There were many, many rounds fired," Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said at a Friday press conference. "We know there were a lot of rounds fired very rapidly."

The message here should be clear, said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, a group opposed to gun violence. "You put a military level of firepower in the hands of civilians, and this is the natural result," she said. "The lesson that other countries have learned is that you have to restrict access to these instruments that allow people to inflict so much injury and death so quickly."

Specifically, Rand said that "high-capacity magazines, whether they're in a pistol or an assault rifle, are the common thread in every major mass shooting in the U.S. going back to the early '80s."

But many politicians are responding to the shooting with pieties rather than policy proposals.

California Gov. Jerry Brown posted the following simple comment: "We mourn for the victims of the Aurora tragedy and send our deepest condolences to the families and communities affected."

That strikes me as the right tone for a public official outside of Colorado to take on the Aurora shootings. I wish both President Obama and Mitt Romney had been about as simple and brief instead of competing to be national Pastor-in-Chief over that mass murder. Romney out-pastored Obama in his speech, which isn't surprising since he was once a bishop in the Mormon Church.

Jerry was a Jesuite novitiate for four years and knows more about Christian theology than most professional theologians - and is as skilled as any politician I know in talking about religion and public policy - but he didn't feel the need to play minister on this. After all, that's what we have ministers and psychologists for. Public officials have commitments enough with their own jobs.

Meanwhile, Rick Warren, the smarmy megachurch minister who lots of Democrats somehow convinced themselves is some kind of loving-minded Christian minister with social concerns that are other than identical to those of the most callous, bigoted rightwingers used the Aurora shootings to demonstrate once again how little reason there is for anyone to think that, as James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix explains: Blaming Evolution for Tragedy 07/21/2012; Why Rick Warren Is Wrong Several Times Over to Blame the Aurora Shooting on Evolution 07/21/2012.

He's referring to Warren's tweet of 07/21/2012

Other than having a more smarmy style, I don't see that his views are notably different from any illiterate fanatic street-preacher. And that's surely unfair to illiterate fanatical street fanatic preachers.

I don't think we need public officials to be our ministers when something like the Aurora killings happen. But I keep forgetting we live in the Postsanity Era. Both Obama and Willard Romney gave much better Christian ministerial comments than Rev. Warren.The Reverend used it as the opportunity to pimp for fourth-rate Christian homeschooling operations who teach that the Loch News monster proves dinosaurs were created six thousand years ago. The man is an embarrassment to every honest form of Christianity.

His defenders could fairly say that he didn't specifically mention the Aurora shootings in that tweet. But anyone who views him as a religious leaders whose opinions count for something to them and who went to his Twitter account that day would surely have understood his comment tweeted late Friday morning as referring to the headline event of the day. So far he hasn't bothered to even tweet that excuse, though he did post some whining about people criticizing him. But that kind of you're-one-what-am-I posturing is typical of Warren's kind of smarminess. The guy has made millions by selling books promoting himself as a benign spiritual leader. It was be silly in the extreme to think he didn't know how his tweet would be read by his fundamentalist followers.

The second of the McGrath pieces linked above discusses how Warren's comment shows how little Warren actually cares about the Christian Bible actually says.

Amy Sullivan, professional Democratic concern troll and enabler of Christian Right smears against Democrats, tweeted back with characteristic cluelessness:

Duh!

That reminds me of how the pioneering blogger Steve Gilliard used to characterize Amy Sullivan, as he did for instance in Code Words The News Blog 04/13/2005. He was less generous the previous year in Abortion is a right 12/15/2004, where he wrote of her position on abortion, "People like Amy Sullivan sell their soul one day at a time. By the time they finish, it's gone and they don't even notice. ... I'm sick of her fake piety and calls for religous conformity."

Even after that slimy Rick Warren punked him over Obama's and McCain's appearances in his megachurch in 2008, Obama still invited this nasty airhead to give a public prayer at his Presidential inauguration. That wasn't turning the other cheek. That was Obama pandering for no good reason to people who hate his guts and who intended to do everything they could do block the mandate on which he was elected.

Tags: aurora shooting, christian right, rick warren

Barack Obama, Rick Warren and the Varieties of "Moderate" Experience

America's Pastor Rick Warren scorns moderation, as he explained to his followers as he invited them to take the Hitler Youth and the Chinese Cultural Revolution as their models for a Christian movement of proselytizing:

And the third part is the dream of a radical devotion of every believer. Now, I choose that word "radical" intentionally, because only radicals change the world. Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people. Moderate people get moderately nothing done. And moderation will never slay the global giants.

No, I'm not sure what he means by "global giants", either.

What Pastor Rick is asking his followers to do here is to reject emotional moderation and instead adopt an attitude of religious enthusiasm. Now, he certainly also leads his flock to believe the will of God includes political positions that are scarcely all moderate: outlawing of abortion, hostility to gay rights, opposition to same-sex marriage. And in his polemics against those he takes to be sinful, he doesn't stick to verbal moderation, either. As Michelle Goldberg writes in A wolf in sheep's clothing Guardian 12/18/08:

If nothing else, Rick Warren is a miracle worker in the realm of public relations. He is a man who compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn't believe in evolution. He recently dismissed the social gospel – the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality – as "Marxism in Christian clothing". Yet thanks to his amiable attitude and jocular tone, he has managed to create a popular image for himself as a moderate, even progressive force in American life, a reasonable, compassionate alternative to the punitive, sex-obsessed inquisitors of the religious right. ...

Warren supported the ballot initiative that stripped gay Californians of their marriage rights. He made the absurd argument that legalised gay marriage constituted a threat to the first amendment rights of religious conservatives. If gay marriage were to remain legal, Warren claimed, those who opposed it could somehow be charged with hate speech should they express their views. This is an utterly baseless canard, but one with great currency in the religious right, the milieu from which Warren consistently draws his ideas. [my emphasis]

She also gives a great example of how emotional non-moderation is part and parcel of Warren's "purpose-driven" religious message:

Warren is sometimes credited with broadening evangelical activism to transcend religious right preoccupations, but that's a bit deceptive. Much has been made of his work on HIV/Aids in Africa. In fact, though, Warren has taken the standard Christian conservative approach to the epidemic, which favours abstinence and prayer over condoms and sex education. I once attended Sunday services at the church of Martin Ssempa, one of Warren's protégés in Uganda and a major force in that country's devastating move away from safe-sex campaigns. It is a heartbreaking thing to watch a tongue-speaking faith-healer promise a room full of sobbing people – many of them poor, many infected with HIV – that Jesus can cure them, if only they believe in him unconditionally (belief demonstrated, of course, in part by tithing generously). [my emphasis]

But there is at least one issue on which America's Pastor is moderate in a way that the acolytes of High Broderism would recognize as such:

Meanwhile, while Warren says he opposes torture, he doesn't treat the subject with anything like the zeal he accords gay marriage and abortion. As he recently told Beliefnet.com, he never even brought up the subject with the Bush administration, where he had considerable access. Just before the 2004 election, he sent out an e-mail to his congregation outlining the five issues that he considered "non-negotiable". "In order to live a purpose-driven life – to affirm what God has clearly stated about his purpose for every person he creates – we must take a stand by finding out what the candidates believe about these five issues, and then vote accordingly," he wrote. The issues were abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning and euthanasia. Torture, apparently, is something that decent Christians can disagree on. [my emphasis]

Moderation as a general attitude is neither good nor bad in itself. In politics, it's held to be a virtue as opposed to "extremism". And in general, part of the point of democracy is to allow the public's business to be conducted in a calm and lawful way, i.e., in a "moderate" manner.

But the punditocracy and the Beltway Village in general use the notion of moderation in a very different way. In the creed of High Broderism, moderation and especially bipartisanship are like the Holy Grail. It's a generally Republican-friendly notion of partisanship but not mainly because of a partisan "bias". It's more a matter of being in awe of Republican macho swagger and a general sense that what is good for the very wealthy is good for America. It's partially a business assumption that to compete against the sensationalist coverage of FOX News and the venom of Republican hate radio, they have to adopt similar approaches to battle over market share. It's partly a commitment to "horse-race" coverage that focuses on who's ahead and who's behind, which implicitly assumes that "both sides" - Democrats and Republicans - are equally legitimate competitors. Even when, as in the case of torture, one side (the Republicans and some "bipartisan" Democrats) are advocating something blatantly cruel, immoral and illegal.

And let's not forget a very obvious part. When it comes to public policies and bureaucratic processes that don't lend themselves to horse-race reporting, our high-end press corps just isn't that bright. Some of them make a lot of money for their celebrity talents, which is highly relevant for their careers in a business that places more value on entertainment than news. (Whether that orientation reflects savvy business assumptions is a different question. Certainly it's leaving the market niche for good news reporting seriously under-served.)

Commenting on a recent piece by reporter and media critic Jay Rosen about how media gatekeepers decide what opinions fit within the range of respectable, the incomparable Daily Howler writes in his 01/19/09 post:

Dis- and misinformation: Quite correctly, Jay says that journalists won’t debate ideas that lurk in the "sphere of deviance." But the problem is actually worse than that: Journalists will actively promote (or tolerate) disinformation about such ideas. It isn't just that journos won't respect a person, like [Michael] Moore, who proposes single-payer [health insurance]; they’ll stand around as hacks present "information" about single-payer systems which is blatantly bogus. (Routinely, Rudy Giuliani was afforded this favor during the last campaign.) ...

Standard Group Stories: In the "sphere of consensus," we find those ideas which journalists take to be obvious. But journalistic conduct has been much worse than that over the past many years. As we have repeatedly noted: Once journalists agree on a Group Idea, they start hatching Accepted Group Stories designed to promote that idea. These Group Stories are often made out of whole cloth - but journalists agree to repeat them anyway. This includes many journalists who know that these stories are counter-factual, illogical or misleading. [my emphasis]

These dysfunctional aspects of our national political press mean that their notion of "moderate" positions acceptable to High Broderism are often articulated in a way that reinforces them with bad reporting, and not seldom very bad reporting. And the commentary on that reporting, which is how a lot of TV news comes packaged, is even worse.

Gene Lyons in Barack Obama's teachable moment Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 01/21/09 takes on the "moderate" ideal of High Broderism:

That's not to say that Obama's calls for bipartisanship, some of which are making infatuated supporters nervous, are wholly mistaken. By signaling an intention to reform Social Security and Medicare, he's frightened some who fear that bipartisanship invariably means slashing benefits - mainly because that's what it means to lazy-minded Beltway pundits constantly preaching "moderation."

In his pungent column at mediamatters.org, Jamison Foser calls this "centrist dogma": the idea that the best solution invariably lies midway between two extremes. The problem is that when one party's dead wrong, as Republicans have been wrong on virtually every economic issue for a generation, that kind of compromise is folly. Imagine where we'd be today, for example, had Bush succeeded in privatizing Social Security. [my emphasis]

On the Social Security and Medicare issues, the positions Obama has taken on those programs himself so far don't actually indicate any support on his part for reducing benefits, as Lyons points out.

Joe Conason in Obama and the New Center New York Observer Online 01/20/09 suggests that Obama's understanding of centrism and, more specifically, bipartisanship is quite different than what the Pod Pundits mean when they talk about those terms:

This speech was neither a programmatic list nor a call to compromise. Mr. Obama laid out the challenges that face the country and explained in broad strokes how he intends to address them - with bold action, necessary expenditure and a summoning of citizens to service. What he invited the nation to do, regardless of party, was to return to the basic American principles that made us strong and great over the past century and that were violated, discarded and mocked by those in power over the past eight years — and through the inordinate and unwholesome influence of the far right for much longer.

He will reach out to bring the Republicans back toward the center, where he hopes that goodwill and patriotic emotion can bring us together to lift us out of the ditch into which their ideology drove us. But now the center will be found in a different place - and bipartisanship again describes a consensus led by liberal Democrats. "The ground has shifted," he warned those who will oppose his ambitious agenda. He has earned the assumption that he means it. [my emphasis]

As Gene Lyons puts it, "The point is to bring aboard those members of the opposition willing to deal with reality."

Tags: barack obama, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, rick warren

America's Pastor suggests models for Christian evangelization

Pastor Rick, are you sure this is what Jesus had in mind?

The only sour point in the almost-here Obama inauguration is the fact that hardline Christian Right preacher Rick Warren will be doing to honors of the official invocation. There have been some interesting comments about Brother Rick the last few days.

Bruce Wilson, a critical-minded observer of the Christian Right, writes about America's Pastor in Rick Warren Cites Hitler Youth as Model For Christian Dedication Talk to Action, 01/15/09. David Neiwert (Rick Warren's vision of Christianity inspired by totalitarians Crooks and Liars 01/16/09) and Digby (Whatever it takes Hullabaloo 01/15/09) have commented on Wilson's post and provided text of the relevant Warren quotes.

For a recent article reflecting the press Village conventional wisdom on America's Pastor, see Obama, Warren and the new evangelicals Obama, Warren and the new evangelicals by Joe Garofoli San Francisco Chronicle 01/18/08. The Village version being that it's just those sore-headed gays and lesbians that are upset with that nice man Brother Rick because he's against same-sex marriage like Obama is, too. Garofoli did manage to notice Max Blumenthal's Daily Beast story on the dubious nature of Warren's anti-AIDS program. Though Garofoli seems oblivious to the fact that it largely undermines America's Pastor's claim to be a kinder, gentler variety of rightwing zealot. Garofoli also makes such highly dubious claims about the nature of Obama's appeal to evangelicals; he seems to be hazy on any distinction between evangelicals, fundamentalists and the Christian Right and also ready to make a shaky assumption that because more evangelicals voted for Obama than for Kerry in 2004 that it must have been the specifically religion-based appeals that produced that result.

I've provided the text of the passages in question later in this post. America's Pastor invokes the Hitler Youth, Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution as counter-examples of how he would like to see Christians organize and get inspired for the cause of Christianity.

It's not unusual for evangelical ministers to try to call up images of a rising, historic movement of Christians. It's also not unusual for conservative ministers to point to images of the enemies of Christianity and America - are aren't those the same thing? - to cast the historic battle as faced with a formidable, determined foe. And, at that level of generality, there's nothing inherently objectionable about it.

But I find Bruce Wilson's analysis of that sermon by America's Pastor to be a sound one. And a good example of specific contextual analysis. He's not making the kind of argument many rightwing Republicans made during last year election., i.e., Hitler attracted big crowds, Obama attracts big crowds, so therefore Obama is like Hitler. Wilson actually does a fact-based analysis, not just drawing polemical parallels based on superficial comparisons.

Leaving aside for the moment the wildly disparate nature of the movements Warren cites, Wilson summarizes:

Having cited dedication and zeal of young Nazis and the efficacy of Bolshevik Revolutionaries, Warren moved on to describe how the sayings of Chairman Mao, printed up in the "Little Red Book", had helped propel the revolutionary fervor of the Chinese Red Guard who had carried out the violent, anarchic revolutionary spasm known as the Cultural Revolution.

As I discovered, some of the history may not be exactly like America's Pastor describes it. But Wilson is almost certainly describing accurately the impression that Warren was creating among his audience of the Saddleback faithful. And he observes:

Though Warren's speech was in the idiom of Christianity, he did not seek to inspire his Saddleback audience with examples of great religious leaders who have changed history through persuasion or other nonviolent approaches. Rick Warren looked to 20th century exemplars of vision and dedication but not to Mohatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or any other religious leaders.

Being the geeky history buff that I am, the Lenin reference America's Pastor used caught my attention. Here is the relevant quote from the YouTube audio Wilson uses provided by the New Apostolic Reformation Research Group "Rick Warren Urges Followers To Emulate Hitler Youth", obtained from Warren's Saddleback Church of America's Pastor:

What is the vision of the next 25 years? I'll tell you what it is.

It is the global expansion of the Kingdom of God.

It is the total mobilization of this church.

And the third part is the dream of a radical devotion of every believer.

Now, I choose that word "radical" intentionally, because only radicals change the world.

Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people.

Moderate people get moderately nothing done.

And moderation will never slay the global giants.

And what examples does he have in mind? This is one he gave:

In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich, Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil.

And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said in the whole stadium, "Hitler, we are yours."

And they nearly took the world.

Lenin once said, "Give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I'll change the world." And he nearly did.

A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds, and they took that nation - the largest nation in the world - by storm, because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.

When I hear those kinds of stories, I think, "What would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say, 'Jesus, we are yours'? What kind of spiritual awakening would we have?"

A few minutes further in his speech, he tells the crowd:

Jesus said, "I want you to do this publicly". So what I want you to do is take the card and in just a minute, and if you say, "Rick I am willing to serve God's purposes in my generation."

I want you to open up to the sign that says, "Whatever it takes." "Whatever it takes."

And I want you to just say, "This is my commitment, before God and in front of everybody else. I'm in."

And I would invite you to just stand quietly and hold up, "Whatever it takes."

[Pause]

I'm looking at a stadium full of people who are saying, "Whatever it takes, God."

Among the Birchers and other far-right groups, apocryphal Lenin quotes have always been a favorite. I remember one that conservative ministers particularly like, which has Lenin saying something to the effect that Communists should encourage pornography and get people to read dirty books, because that will undermine their moral fiber and allow the Commies to overthrow capitalism.

The 100-men quote strikes me as a little odd in the context America's Pastor gives it. It doesn't really sound very Leninist on the face of it, a key element of the Leninist brand of Marxism having been the notion of the "vanguard party", a dedicated group of professional revolutionaries who lead the working class in the anti-capitalist revolution. But he was talking about building nationwide parties with functional international cooperation with other such parties. Not getting a hundred guys together in a big room and plotting a coup.

Now, it's not unthinkable that he would have said something like that at some moment of intra-party struggle, like possibly when he pushed the Bolsheviks in 1917 to mount a revolutionary opposition against the Kerensky regime that had immediately replaced the Czar.

But I don't know Russian and Lenin's works fill at least a couple of dozen volumes. So I focused instead on the Hitler Youth reference, which also struck me as a bit odd once I started thinking about it. He refers to young people in brown shirts at a big public event in Munich in 1939, which seems to be a reference to the Hitler Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) since he specifies young people, though he doesn't mention the HJ specifically.

So I fired up my trusty Yahoo! Deutschland search engine and searched for "hitler jugend muenchen 1939". It took me to articles in Wikipedia and Bildungswiki, a similar service. I saw entries talking about how membership in the HJ was made legally compulsory in 1939 even against the parents' wishes. But no reference to a giant rally in Munich.

I searched on "hitler jugend wir sind deine", which would be my first retranslation of "we are yours" back into German. Zippo.

Then I went to the library and did a quick check of 10 or so books on the HJ, in both German and English. It wasn't thorough research. But I didn't find squat about a Munich rally for the HJ in 1939. The most important events for the HJ in 1939 seemed to have been the introduction in March of that legally compulsory membership in the HJ for youth starting at 10 years old, and the start of the Second World War with the invasion of Poland in September. The theme of the HJ for 1939 was promoting health among young people.

The closest I came to anything resembling the "Hitler, we are yours" quote that Pastor Rick uses in that speech was a poster for the girls' parallel group, the BDM (Bund deutscher Maedchen), that said, addressing the BDM members, "Du gehörst dem Führer". Which I would translate as "You belong to the Fürher", which for what it's worth sounds like a more passive concept than "we are yours". "You are the Fürher's" would be a possible translation, but not the best one.

Later I found the following 1943 poster online at the Deutsches Historisches Museum site, which associates it with the HJ:


The main slogan here is, "Führer, dir gehören wir" (Führer, we belong to you), which could be less well translated as the phrase Pastor Rick used, "Hitler, we are yours". So something like that slogan was at least in use among the HJ and BDM. (The text at the bottom reads, "The future can bring nothing but victory. And if the world asks us the reason, we will say: Because the Lord God gave us the Führer." - Artur Axmann)

"Führer", by the way, is a German word for "leader". In one of the more obsessive-compulsive aspects of Nazism, the word was exclusively reserved for Hitler himself during the Third Reich, I believe by an actual law.

Now, as Rummy famously observed, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. But if there was such an event, it doesn't seem to have loomed as large in importance for the HJ as the Nuremberg Nazi Party rally of the Berlin Olympics did for the Party and the Nazi state.

More importantly, though, the HJ wasn't entirely a voluntary group. While it wasn't until March 1939 that the HJ membership became compulsory, the HJ and the BDM basically controlled access to recreation facilities for kids. If you wanted your kids to participate in athletics or the hiking clubs that were so popular in Germany, they pretty much had to be in the HJ or the BDM. They were definitely organizations that were meant to indoctrinate kids in Nazi ideology and militarism. But even before 1939, it was a quasi-compulsory organization for kids.

Which is yet another thing that makes it an, um, ah, imperfect model for a Christian religious movement.

Tags: christian right, christianism,hitler jugend,hitler jugend

Yo! Rick Warren's compassionate (?!?) conservatism on AIDS

Max Blumenthal is continuing the tradition of father Sidney in being a journalistic scourge of the right wing. He takes a look at Rick Warren's AIDS project in Africa, a big part of what supposedly makes him a "moderate" in Rick Warren's Africa Problem The Daily Beast 01/07/08.

But since the Warren inauguration controversy erupted, the nature of work against AIDS in Africa has gone unexamined. Warren has not been particularly forthcoming to those who have attempted to look into it. His website contains scant information about the results of his program. However, an investigation into Warren’s involvement in Africa reveals a web of alliances with right-wing clergymen who have sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education. More disturbingly, Warren’s allies have rolled back key elements of one of the continent’s most successful initiative, the so-called ABC program in Uganda. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations’ special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told the New York Times their activism is “resulting in great damage and undoubtedly will cause significant numbers of infections which should never have occurred.”

What's next? Do we find out that Warren's alleged concern for the environment manifests itself in support of "clean coal" propaganda? Blumenthal's report continues:

Warren’s man in Uganda is a charismatic pastor named Martin Ssempa. The head of the Makerere Community Church, a rapidly growing congregation ... In the capitol of Kampala, Ssempa is known for his boisterous crusading. Ssempa’s stunts have included burning condoms in the name of Jesus and arranging the publication of names of homosexuals in cooperative local newspapers while lobbying for criminal penalties to imprison them.

Dr. Helen Epstein, a public health consultant who authored the book, The Invisible Cure: Why We’re Losing The Fight Against AIDS In Africa, met Ssempa in 2005. Epstein told me the preacher seemed gripped by paranoia, warning her of a secret witches coven that met under Lake Victoria. “Ssempa also spoke to me for a very long time about his fear of homosexual men and women,” Epstein said. “He seemed very personally terrified by their presence.”

He reports on a 2005 AIDS event at Warren's Saddleback Church:

Joining Ssempa at Warren’s church were two key Bush administration officials who controlled the purse strings of the president’s newly minted $15 billion anti-AIDS initiative in Africa, PEPFAR. Ugandan first lady Janet Museveni also appeared through a videotaped address to tout the success of her country’s numerous church-based abstinence programs.

These Bush officials - Randall Tobias, the Department of State’s Global AIDS coordinator, and Claude Allen, the White House’s chief domestic policy advisor - are closely linked to the Christian right. Tobias, the so-called “global AIDS czar,” declared in 2004 that condoms “really have not been very effective," and crusaded against prostitution, until he resigned in 2007 when he was exposed as a regular client of the D.C. Madam’s escort service. Allen, once an aide to the late Senator Jesse Helms, resigned in 2006 after he was arrested for felony thefts from retail stores.

This, of course, is an indication of how one of Bush's few "compassionate conservative" programs was largely a piggy-bank and propaganda machine for the Christian Right. The late Congressman Tom Lantos tried to get the federal program based on a more scientific and more honest approach. And what position did that "moderate" Rich Warren take?

Troubled by what he was witnessing in Africa, Rep. Tom Lantos led the new Democratic-controlled Congress to reform PEPFAR during a reauthorization process in February 2008. Lantos insisted that Congress lift the abstinence-only earmark imposed by Republicans in 2002, and begin to fund family planning elements like free condom distribution. His maneuver infuriated Warren, who immediately boarded a plane for Washington to join Christian right leaders including born-again former Watergate felon Chuck Colson for an emergency press conference on the Capitol lawn. In his speech, Warren claimed that Lantos’ bill would spawn an increase in the sex trafficking of young women. The bill died and PEPFAR was reauthorized in its flawed form. (Days later, Lantos died of cancer after serving for 27 years in Congress.)[my emphasis]

But, as we know, some of Warren's best friends are gay. Or something like that:

Warren, in his effort to dispel criticism, has denied harboring homophobic sentiments. “I could give you a hundred gay friends,” he told MSNBC’s Ann Curry on December 18. “I have always treated them with respect. When they come and want to talk to me, I talk to them.”

But when Uganda’s Anglican bishops threatened to bolt from the Church of England because of its tolerant stance towards homosexuals, Warren parachuted into Kampala to confer international legitimacy on their protest. “The Church of England is wrong and I support the Church of Uganda on the boycott,” Warren proclaimed in March 2008. Declaring homosexuality an unnatural way of life, Warren flatly stated, “We shall not tolerate this aspect [homosexuality in the church] at all.”

What a scamster. Is there anything poltically or religiously "moderate" about Rick Warren at all?

Tags: christian right, christianism, rick+warren

Some of my best friends think Rick Warren is a rightwinger

Maybe the attention I've given to "America's pastor"-wannabee Rick Warren in my posts the last few days is excessive. But looking at the doings and ever-changing marketing strategies of the Christian Right has pretty much always been a focus of my attention.

The Christian Right has long since become not just a player but a fixture of American politics. They are the Republican Party's primary base. But the general media treatment of them has been poor. Not in the sense that Republican victimology calls for, as when Christianists argue constantly that they are being horribly persecuted by "secularists".

Rather the reporting has often been ill-informed and superficial. And the analysis, while occasionally dismissive in an unrealistic way, has tended to treat the professed intentions of Christian Right groups and leaders at face value, at least until one of them gets caught out in a financial or sex scandal. And ever since Paul Weyrich and his collaborators organized the Christian Right around defending the tax-exempt status of segregated private church-affiliated schools,

(On Weyrich's role, see Remembering Paul Weyrich by Max Blumenthal, TalktoAction blog 12/20/08, and Paul Weyrich, “Godfather” of Modern Conservative Movement, Dead at 66 by Bill Berkowitz Rreligion Dispatches 12/19/08.)

Stirling Newberry at FireDogLake (Rick Warren Pays Himself First 12/21/08) does the kind of analysis that is badly needed about Christian Right groups. He references a post by Juan Cole, who after appearing at a conference with Warren, is ready to buy Warren's marketing spin: "Warren, in short, is a representative of the turn of some evangelicals to a social gospel."

Cole is an expert on Shi'a Islam and one of my favorite bloggers and commentators. I've probably quoted him as much in my blog posts as I have any other one person. But I think he got snowed on this one. Since Warren just a few days ago was dismissing unnamed representatives of the Social Gospel variety of Christianity as "closet Marxists" - which he certainly didn't mean as a compliment! - I'm afraid Juan is being overly generous to the Rev. Warren in this case.

What Newberry does is look at some examples of actual projects that Warren promotes that are at the center of his claim to be a kinder, gentler version of fundamentalist bigot. Newberry writes:

Many people praise his social engagement, in for example, AIDs intervention. The people who I know in NGOs are considerably less impressed. It turns out that Warren's social gospel is a great deal like his theological gospel: a fraud, used to beat down opposition by declarations of love and submission, and then a demand for money to be used for the multiplication of his, rather than His, servants. Let me take two examples from his PEACE project.

The arguement [sic] of PEPFAR, Bush's AIDs plan, is that churches, already being present and having authority, can be used for service delivery. However, the "P" in "PEACE" stands for ... "plant churches." If Churches are already present, then there is no need to plant them, now is there? If they are not already present, it means that funding for PEACE is really government funding for missionary conversion work. In fact, the second letter is to create missionaries. One has to get to "A" before doing anything for actual people. Warren pays himself first. [my emphasis]

Note here that Newberry's analysis of the "PEACE" program is going on the project own self-description, which on the face of it raises questions about the alleged "social" component of Warren's message and programs.

Is this really so difficult that reporters at our major lack the time or research skills to do it?

I'll interject here that in an early stage of my own career, I worked as a funding administrator on grants to private job-training programs. I was particularly impressed that religious-affiliated groups with whom I dealt, like the National Conference of Christians and Jews and the Catholic-affiliated St. Vincent de Paul charity not only did a good job and kept good records. They also knew how to keep a reasonable separation between the charity aspects of their work and any proselytising activities. And that was years before Bush's "faith-based programs". Many religious charities do good work and governments are well-advised to work constructively with them. But if we're handing out tax money or evaluating the actual nature of those programs, we need to look at results, not just stated intentions. And when the stated intentions put church expansion and proselytising as the top priorities, that's something that needs to be taken into full account.

Newberry also looks at a related project, PEACE, "Hispanics for Christ":

It's sole objective? Create churches among American Hispanics and convert them. That's the whole project. One can say many things about the American hispanic population, but an absence of Christianity isn't any of them. As a group Hispanics attend church more than whites. Saturation planting of churches is its aim, with no other objective. PEACE means sectarian conflict first. There is one for Mexico too. Note that the "ACE" is dispensed with, and only the "PE" is funded. Help the poor? First get their donations and devotion. Rick Warren Pays himself first. [my emphasis]

I do want to emphasize that Newberry is not looking at the specific results in his post. But what he sets up is an important framework, which is that Warren's "social" programs sound even by their own self-descriptions more like religious-proselytizing programs.

But Newberry's closing polemical remarks are, for that reason, not well supported in his analysis as presented there. For instance, it's a thought-provoking idea when he says, that Warren's PEACE project in the Philippines "is Disaster Christianity. Find hopeless people, give them a few goods and services, and then build a theocracy. It is the model of Hamas in Palestine."

But Hamas actually does deliver some kind of basic services and also functions as a political party. Hizbullah in Lebanon uses a similar model. Newberry's own comments suggest instead that Warren's projects may provide very little in the way of actual social services or training to organize concrete demands to governments on material needs.

I haven't read Warren's famous and, even in Juan Cole's analysis, pretty superficial book, A Purpose Driven Life, which Newberry describes as "a book that is like a cigarette commercial, it is designed, not to persuade people who have some question about religion, but to make people who are already addicts switch to Saddleback [Warren's church]."

He goes on to criticize Warren: "Rick Warren is that typical figure from Christian history, the pastor who consorts with Mammon, such as Rupert Murdoch, and tells them that wealth is good. In his book he repeatedly says that handling worldly wealth is a sign of spiritual good."

This may well be a fair criticism. But it's also worth noting that one of Warren's selling points as a kinder, gentler Christianist involves criticizing the "prosperity gospel", at least in a general way. I'm guessing that a closer analysis of Warren's positions on this would show that his criticisms are directed more at the particulars of the "prosperity gospel" advocates, many of whom are Pentecostals. But that he also promotes in practice the idea that God is especially fond of the wealthy, though even a hardline Christian Right leader like Warren is unlikely to phrase it like that.

One last thing. It's not mentioned in the articles discussed above. But when Warren says, "I have many gay friends. I've eaten dinner in gay homes", does it strike anyone else but me that this sounds an awful lot like the stereotypically phony claim: "Some of my best friends are Negroes", "Some of my best friends are Jews", etc.?

Tags: christian right, christianism, rick warren

Why Dave Neiwert is one of my favorite writers

He understands the Radical Right in America, including the "respectable" versions. In fact, he's done some very good work pointing out how some ideas and positions migrate from the white supremacist and "patriot militia" gutters to the Republican Party through transitters like Ron Paul.

How the Christian Right sees Democrats, gays, Jews and mainstream Christians (not to mention Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists)

In Some other 'bridge-building' invitees to Obama's inauguration Crooks and Liars 12/20/08, he defines the problem in dealing with rattlesnakes of the Radical Right, which now heavily overlaps with the Republican Party:

It's understandable, given his background as a community organizer (not to mention someone who pitches "the audacity of hope"), that Obama believes you can reach out a hand to movement conservatives and build such bridges. Indeed, he's made it clear all along that's the kind of guy he is.

I just hope that when he finally gets that hand back after reaching it out and discovers it has been chewed clean down to the bone by a thousand vicious cuts that he has a little awakening about the nature of the nasty little beast the American Right has become in the past couple of decades. Such gestures for them are mere signs of weakness, nothing but opportunities to advance themselves and their agendas and to destroy liberals. [my emphasis]

It's also notable here that Dave takes into account Obama's community-organizer experience, something that even good analysts (i.e., other than the run-of-the-mill Big Pundits) often neglect to do. The Republicans during the Presidential campaign tried to demonize the whole concept of the Saul Alinski style of community organizing. But Alinski's approach wasn't just a style. It also involves a philosophy of democratic direct action along with a suspicion of grand ideology. Obama's selection of Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor, to the cheers of organized labor across the board, including the most activist segements, was probably influenced by that background to some significant degree.

But one of the weaknesses of Alinski's approach is just what Dave points out in that post. Because the approach focuses on issues rather than broad ideology, its practitioners may be slow to appreciate how a genuinely authoritarian-oriented organization operates: like today's Republican Party and the Christian Right movement that is its main voter base today.

Dave's post has a very appropriate graphic that is not to be missed.

While we're on the subject of anti-gay, Jews-are-going-to-Hail, liberal-Christians-are-Commies leader Rick Warren, Joan Walsh took some time out from her year-end vacation to weigh in on the Christian gentleman in Disappointed by Rick Warren Salon 12/19/08:

I am not theoretically opposed to Obama choosing an antiabortion gay-rights critic; I'm opposed to Warren himself. He's a poster boy for kinder, gentler 21st century bigotry, and Obama shouldn't validate him with this lofty symbolic role. ...

Beyond his noxious political views - Warren has compared homosexuality to incest and bestiality, supports the Iraq war, and, in fact, just gave George W. Bush his first-ever "international medal of peace" (yes, peace) - I have come to distrust Warren personally. He looks to be from a long line of religious leaders more concerned about their own glory than the glory of God. I didn’t like him high-fiving with Obama about their million-dollar book deals, or complaining with McCain that $250,000 isn't rich in Orange County. I didn't like him misrepresenting the rules for the August [Saddleback] forum [featuring Obama and McCain] - he claimed McCain had been in a "cone of silence," but when that turned out not to have been true, he accused Obama supporters of "sour grapes" for complaining. It became obvious to me that the well-fed, well-coiffed Warren is full of himself, and Obama shouldn't contribute to his campaign for self-aggrandizement, especially at the expense of gay people and women, two groups who gave Obama strong support.

On MSNBC this afternoon my friend [ironically meant?] Chris Matthews kept saying that Obama has upset gays with this choice, but I'm not gay, and Warren's anti-gay rights stands are only part of my reasons for opposing his selection (although his leadership in the fight for the noxious Proposition 8, which Obama opposed, is certainly a reason to oppose his being given this special symbolic spiritual role). I object to the full Warren package, I think he's a force for division, not inclusion, and a terrible symbol for this inspiring new administration. And once again, I see an arrogance and/or naiveté on the part of Obama, when he defends his choice of Warren ... as showing "we can disagree and not be disagreeable." I'd tell that to Rick Warren, not his critics. [my emphasis]

I've also noticed that the Establishment press, echoing the position of Warren's defenders, tend to paint criticism of Warren's Inaugural role as based primarily on his opposition to same-sex marriage. Give his prominent role this year in campaigning for Proposition 8 in California - with a thoroughly dishonest claim about how Prop 8 would outlaw preachers criticizing homosexuality - that's obviously part of the reason.

But, as Joan says, there's good reason for anyone not a partisan of the Christian Right to "object to the full Warren package". His obnoxious comparison of abortion to the Holocaust sure smells like "good" ole Christian anti-Semitism to me. I wish the press (if we had a real press corps) would give more attention to that ugly angle of Warren's ideology.

When it comes to cooperating with Christian Right groups, Democrats need to take a real put-up-or-shut-up attitude. They're concerned about global climate change? Fine, if they support meaningful public policies to combat it, then let them lobby for those policies. And do it without adding in some anti-science propaganda.

They want to help combat AIDS? Great. If it's not just some excuse to promote fraudulent abstinence-only sex education that lies about medical facts around sex and reproduction and fails to provide full information on safe sex, then Democrats could probably find a way to cooperate with it.

But Democrats and mainstream Christians shouldn't enable anti-gay bigots, anti-Semites or Bircher-style fanatics to pass off their "noxious political [and religious] views" in those areas as some kind of moderation or good will.

I'm assuming when Joan Walsh talks about "kinder, gentler 21st century bigotry", she doesn't mean that she wouldn't like to see bigots become kinder and gentler. She's referring to the fact that slicker advertising doesn't mean that the basic product has become any better.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, rick warren, radical right

Compromising with Christianists

Rick Warren: aspires to be America's pastor - says gays and lesbians are like child-molesters and practitioners of incest - thinks Jews are going to Hail

Glenn Greenwald puts the Warren invocation flap in the larger context of continuing Democratic efforts to placate the "culture warriors", efforts that continue to fail: How new is Obama's New Politics? Salon 12/19/08. He scratches his head over the notion that Democratic efforts to conciliate hardline rightwing Republicans are hardly something new under the sun. "When have Democrats not been eager to accommodate the Right, to sacrifice their ideological beliefs and partisan goals in pursuit of post-partisan harmony, to jettison the 'Left' in order to attract the Mythical, Glorious Center?" he asks.

And he highly recommends two posts, Obama's Divisive Choice of Rick Warren by Michelle Goldberg Religion Dispatches 12/18/08 and This Will Be My Last Post On This, So Help Me Flying Spaghetti Monster by John Cole, Balloon Juice blog 12/18/08.

Michelle's article covers some of the same ground I did in my previous post, raising the question of just how it is that people make Warren out to be a "moderate" when his stated positions and his nasty rhetoric on abortion and LGBT issues make him sound like standard-issue Christian Right. If someone thinks you're working for the Devil, they're probably not eager to compromise with you or even soft pedal their attacks on you.

John's post is focused on pointing out that, whatever the problems of spotlighting Rick Warren, it has to be judged against Obama's record of support for LGBT rights. (I'm not much a language vanguardist, so "LGBT" still seems like an awkward construction to me. Especially since when it's articulated verbally as "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender", it sounds like something out of a legal brief. But "LGBT" is becoming common, so I guess I'll adapt. "Christianists" wasn't part of my vocabulary either until a couple of years ago.)

One of Warren's weirder comments recently was saying that adherents of the Christian "social gospel" are pretty much just dirty Commies: Rick Warren: Social Gospel & "Marxism in Christian Clothing" by Steve Waldman, BeliefNet 12/15/98 (a date attached to a BeliefNet article - it's a miracle!)

This is nothing new, at least not among Fundis. Today's Christian Right can trace much of their ideology back to characters like Billy James Hargis and the John Birch Society that were notable presences on the far right in the 1950s and early 1960s. But then adherents of such notions were generally understood to be far right, not mainstream Republican Party ideology. Add in segregationist outlooks - the "hate crimes" legislation Warren so much opposes along with the rest of his bretheren and sisteren was known as "anti-lynching" legislator in the 1940s and 1950s when their spiritual ancestors also opposed it. Mix with Christian Zionism, a British import from the 19th century, and you've got today's Christian Right. And Rick Warren.

It's also nothing new for Fundis to demand that even their nastiest political stances and their kookiest theological beliefs be taken seriously when they are articulated by someone who can string two or three sentences together without obvious grammatical mistakes.

But at some basic level, respect also involves looking at how a leader like Warren describes his own beliefs and goals and not just declare him a respectable "moderate" just because he looks okay when he smiles for the camera.

Given the, uh, very generous way in which the Republicans these days use labels like "socialist", "Marxist", "pals around with terrorists", etc., it's worth asking just who rightwingers are talking about when they use one of those labels. Tom DeLay during the campaign on cable news told us that Obama was a "Marxist-Leninist".

Steve Waldman in the article linked above talks about some specific advocates of Social Gospel Christianity, which he apparently understands as including "liberation theology", which itself is quite a stretch. The Social Gospel by that name was a religiously-inspired, Protestant movement of social reform around the start of the 20th century. It was epitomized popularly by the novel What Would Jesus Do?

The Web site for Bill Moyers' NOW talks about three of the early leaders of this variety of the American Social Gospel movement:

The READER'S COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY mentions three leaders of the Social Gospel movement: Washington Gladden, who "sympathized with workers and urged them to seek unity in Christianity," William Dwight Porter Bliss, who worked with the Knights of Labor and Socialist party, and Walter Rauschenbusch, a New York City Baptist minister who "called for a democratic cooperative society to be achieved by nonviolent means."

The Socialist Party? Surely that makes Bliss a Marxist, right? Not necessarily. Bliss was an adherent of "Christian socialism", which Answers.com describes as follows:

This doctrine—which grows out of the adherents' Christianity, so that the term is more specific than merely indicating those socialists who also happen to be Christian — attempts to relate the teachings of Christ (as for instance given in the Sermon on the Mount) with the political practice of socialism. In Britain Christian socialism was a mainly nineteenth-century movement, associated both with the High Church revival and its attempts to spread Christianity into the working classes and also with the growth of Nonconformism, especially Methodism, which placed importance on its social ministry. Many Labour politicians in Britain argued that their party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. Christian socialist thinking favoured alternatives to capitalism in such ideas as co-operatives, and stressed the importance of industrial reconciliation and justice between workers and owners, the moral responsibilities of the better-off towards the poor, and the importance of public education. The Christian socialist strand in the leadership of the Labour Party was boosted on Tony Blair's accession to the leadership.

Post-war Christian Democratic parties in Europe are not a variant of Christian socialism but represent a version of conservatism which accommodates (mainly Catholic) social doctrine. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria [Germany] is Christian Democrat, not Christian Socialist. [my emphasis]

In other words, if you're using "Marxist" as something other than a pejorative, we would have to say that if there were any Marxists among the Social Gospel movement in America or England, they were the exception rather than the rule.

For anyone who actually cares about history, Marxism was associated with atheism and/or hostility to church authority, including in Marx's native Germany. The Catholic Church in the 19th century was generally hostile toward the workers movement and their parties. And generally speaking, pro-democracy movements in Europe and Latin America adhered with various degrees of enthusiasm to the classical liberal goal of the separation of church and state. This meant that there was and to some extent still is in those areas an "anticlerical" strain of political thought that has really not been that significant in American politics or political ideologies. I saw someone say that it's difficult for anyone who hasn't experienced an established state church to understand "anticlercialism".

In the 20th century, Communist regimes have been officially atheist, practicing various degrees of tolerance (or lack thereof) toward Christian churches, depending on the place and time.

But for all that, Karl Marx's political, social and economic theories don't require the embrace of atheism. I don't think there have ever been a lot of people describing themselves as Christian Marxists, and certainly most adherents of the Social Gospel in the US were not among them. But Marx's own atheism came from his grounding in philosophical materialism. Ironically, one of the stock Cold War accusations that Westerners made against the Soviet Communists was that the Soviets were materialists. That was meant in the sense of "Godless Communism".

In the colloquial sense of "materialism", as in excessive consumption and greed for money and stuff, of course, the material abundance of the West was used as an argument for the virtues of democracy and capitalism. And, outside the "prosperity gospel" variant, it's a general value in American Christianity that materialism in the greed-for-stuff sense is a failing of our society, even a great problem.

Also, one problem of Warren's vague slam at the "social gospel" as "Marxist" is that in the controversy between conservative Vatican officials and the liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino, their alleged taint from Marxist philosophical materialism was one of the Vatican's accusations against them.

But I'm guessing from his other comments in the same interview with Waldman that Warren wasn't thinking much about philosophical or theological issues. He was just tossing out a typical Fundi/Bircher type insult.

Waldman should have pressed Warren himself more on who he meant to be calling "closet Marxists". Did he have some real point? Or was he just tossing out a sleazy insult?

If our news media are going to annoint Rick Warren as "America's pastor", then people interviewing him should pin him down more specifically on Bircher-sounding comments like that.
Tags: christian right, christianism, lgbt rights, rick warren

Obama and the moderate (?) Christianists

Billy Sunday ready to do battle for the Lord

You can count me as one of those people not thrilled by Obama's invitation to Christian Right leader Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration next month. (For a lot more on the Inauguration issue, see Memeorandum.)

I really think Warren acted in bad faith around the now-legendary (to the media) joint appearance at Warren's Saddleback Church this past August. I actually think Obama got punked in that one. There may be have been some advantage to his having gone, if only to take some of the air out of that crusty Republican lie that Democrats are anti-religion. (How many bills are pending in Congress to eliminate the charitable contribution tax deduction for donations to churches?)

I want to call attention to a couple of points that I think are important to keep in focus on this issue. One is from Sarah Posner, who I think it's safe to say is one of the leading journalistic experts on the Christian Right. Looking at the election results, she writes, "Obama did not win over white evangelicals in any greater numbers than he won over any other demographic - in other words, ... Obama won across so many voter groups that one cannot argue that (a) the evangelicals swayed the election in his favor or (b) that evangelicals shifted any more significantly than any other group of voters did." (The FundamentaList The American Prospect Online 12/17/08). In other words, there is reason in the election results to believe that religious-type appeals had any effect in drawing additional conservative white evangelicals to Obama and the Democrats.

In that post, she cites this article, Culture Wars, Evangelicals, and Political Power: Lessons from the 2008 Presidential Election by Chip Berlet and Frederick Clarkson, PublicEye.org (n.d., circa 12/17/08) Sarah also addressed this issue the week of the election in Obama and Religious Voters The American Prospect Online 11/06/08.

I think it's long past time that the Democrats stop tippy-toeing around this rightwingers with their unremitting hostility to women's rights and their shameless hate-mongering against gays and lesbians. And for Democrats to quit pandering to this grotesque falsehood that the Christian Right has been pimping for decades that Democrats are "hostile to people of faith".

This is a recent interview from BeliefNet with Warren. (One reason I don't cite BeliefNet more than I do is their thoroughly aggravating habit of not dating their articles, though this one is from December 2008. Somehow I pulled a date on the one cited further below.)

Warren in this interview repeats some of the sleazier notions that are standard on the Christian Right: abortion is like the Holocaust (see below on that topic). Here's how this brave man of God addresses the torture issue:

Torture. You issued a statement a couple of years ago condemning torture.

I’m totally against torture.

Do you think this was a profound moral failing of the Bush administration?

Well I don’t know exactly how they defined torture….

John McCain thinks they did torture.

Well, and you know what – some of the stuff I saw looking at Guantanamo looks like clearly it was torture. To me, if you torture someone, you put yourself no better than the enemy. We must maintain the moral high ground. You have no right to condemn the immoral actions of others if we’re doing the same thing. And we should expect that others will torture our people if we’re torturing them.

Did you ever talk to President Bush to try to convince him to change his policy?

No. No.

Why not?

Never got the chance. I just didn’t. In fact, in the first place, I’m a pastor, and people might misunderstand – I don’t deal with policy issues with Barack Obama or President Clinton [sic] or John McCain. I just don’t. That’s not my role. My role is to pastor these guys. As a leader I understand stress. [my emphasis]

This just makes me want to puke. Any Christian who can't straight-forwardly condemn what the entire world knows is Bush's torture policy may still qualify as a Christian. But their moral judgment is worthless. In the same interview, Pastor Rick piously explains why a girl impregnated through rape or incest should be required to bear her rapist's child to term. And then he can't straightforwardly condemn the torture policy. How anyone can take this man seriously as a moral leader, I just don't understand.

Oh, he says, it's not his job to counsel Dear Leader Bush to stop torturing people!

I wish I could say this man is a rotten excuse for a Christian. But that a centuries-old bad habit, to pretend that Christian that practice this kind of faith aren't "true Christians". In fact, they are. And something about the real existing Christian religion in America makes a cowardly supporter of torture - and that's what his statement I quoted is, the mealy-mouthed "moderate" version of supporting torture - a credible candidate for "America's pastor". This reminds me I need to go to Mass more often to at least do my small part to see that torture supporters won't get a monopoly on Christianity in America.

The torture-supporting pastor goes on to compare gay couples to child molesters and practitioners of incest. This isn't just conservative. It's vile, hate-mongering fanaticism. Then he pulls out one of the favorite rightwinger victimology lines:

We should have freedom of speech, ok? And you should be able to have freedom of speech to make your position and I should be able to have freedom of speech to make my position, and can’t we do this in a civil way.

Nobody is trying to deny even hate-mongering rightwingers like Warren free speech. On the contrary, one of the great values of free speech is that we get to hear what bigots like this think directly from them.

Freedom of speech means you don't get put in jail for saying whatever damn fool things comes into your head. It doesn't mean that when you spew gutter nonsense than any decent person is required to respect you or what you said.

Punked at Saddleback

Getting back to Warren's Saddleback stab-in-the-back, Joan Walsh got it right in in Sandbagged at Saddleback, which says an awful lot to me about what Rick Warren's posturing as new breed of conservative evangelical leader is really about:

Now Rick Warren tells BeliefNet that Barack Obama is going to have to do more than "talk faith" to win evangelical votes, and compares an evangelical Christian voting for a pro-choice politician to a Jew voting for a Holocaust denier. I understand why many people say it was good for Obama to go to Warren's church nonetheless; I didn't feel that way, and I feel even less that way today. I loved Mike Madden's fair and informative stories on Saddleback Church this weekend ... but I thought it was telling he didn't find a single church member who said he or she would vote for Obama.

I was also shocked by how disrespectfully Warren dismissed Obama supporters' complaints about John McCain not being in a "cone of silence" where he couldn't hear the questions as "sour grapes" - which kind of implies Obama lost the contest. The fact is, Warren knew that McCain hadn't arrived yet when he started the event, but he nonetheless told the audience the GOP contender was in a "cone of silence" that sounded very much like a green room without television or radio. That sounds like a lie, Rick, and lying is wrong. It breaks one of the Ten Commandments. [my emphasis]

Anytime conservative Christians in a political context start using words like "Jews" or "Holocaust", it pays to listen carefully to what they.

Rick Warren's anti-abortion, anti-choice theology

Aimee Semple MacPherson wrestles with the giant gorilla Evolution

The BeliefNet interview to which Walsh refers is here, Rick Warren on His Saddleback Summit with McCain and Obama 08/18/08:

For many evangelicals, of course, if they believe that life begins at conception, that's a deal breaker for a lot of people. If they think that life begins at conception, then that means that there are 40 million Americans who are not here [because they were aborted] that could have voted. They would call that a holocaust and for them it would like if I'm Jewish and a Holocaust denier is running for office. I don't care how right he is on everything else, it's a deal breaker for me. I'm not going to vote for a Holocaust denier... (my emphasis)

He's putting this comment in the mouths of "many evangelicals", but he's making an obvious point of injecting the Holocaust/Holocaust-denier theme, which he surely knows is a staple of hardline Christian Right rhetoric. Warren also talks about the Democratic Party's latest statement of the pro-choice position, using a kind of mealy-mouthed, you're-one-what-am-I approach:

It is a step, there's no doubt about that. I've been getting a lot of feedback on it. I was out of the country and people starting writing me about it. The general perception was 'Too little too late--window dressing". I'm not saying I would say this, because I haven't even read it, but what I was hearing form people was that [Democrats] were saying 'It's OK to be pro-life and be a Democrat now. In other words, 'You can join us. We're not changing our firm commitment to Roe v. Wade, but you can now join us.' Well, for a person who thinks that abortion is taking a life, I'm sure that's not going to be very satisfactory to most of those people. And to put it in right at the last minute at the end of a campaign, there was some question about that: Why are they doing this?

And I don't know how to read his following comment in any other way than that his intention with the "moderate" evangelical talk is primarily to push the Democrats to an anti-choice position on abortion - or maybe only as a slightly different angle to accuse the Dems of being baby-killers, just like the hardline Christian Right types do:

That's why to say that evangelicals are a monolith is a myth, but the other thing is that you've been hearing a lot of the press talk about 'Well, evangelicals are changing, they're now interested in poverty and disease and illiteracy, and all the stuff I've been talking about for five years now. And I have been seeding that into the evangelical movement and it's getting picked up and a lot of people are talking about doing humanitarian efforts. But I really think it's wishful thinking on a lot of people who think they're going to drop the other issues. They're not leaving pro-life, I'm just trying to expand the agenda....

If an evangelical really believes that the Bible is literal--in other word in Psalm 139 God says 'I formed you in your mother's womb and before you were born I planned every day of your life,' if they believe that's literally true, then they can't just walk away from that. They can add other issues, but they can't walk away from the belief that at conception God planned that child and to abort it would be to short circuit the purpose. (my emphasis)

I'm not a "literalist" in reading the Christian Bible. But neither is Warren's reading there a "literal" one. That verse says that for at least the person God is addressing there, God has a mission of some kind for that person to fulfill, a "calling", in Christian terms. In fact, if we want to do a close reading of the English translation he uses there, the Psalm actually makes a distinction between being formed in the mother's womb and "before you were born". That could be read to imply a distinction in time: the fetus is formed in the mother's womb; God makes a plan for the person's future; then the person is born. If the Psalmist meant to say that "human life begins at conception", why not just say "before I formed you in you mother's womb I planned every day of your life". Or maybe just say, "human life begins at conception".

Close reading of the Scriptures doesn't always support the fundamentalist so-called "literalist" reading.

Democrats try to sidestep the question of the morality of abortion itself by emphasizing that it's a matter of a woman's choice. Which in itself is a perfectly legitimate position. But abortion laws should to be based on some kind of accurate empirical understanding. The Supreme Court in the Roe v. Wade decision relied on the fact that until the end of the second trimester, the fetus cannot survive separately from the woman's body. Medically, the fetus has to be understood as part of the woman's body up until that point. And that medical reality hasn't changed since 1973, despite all the advances in prenatal care and treatment of premature births. And despite all the phony claims, anecdotal and otherwise, that the anti-abortionists make.

I don't know if any form of abortion was practiced in the time the Psalmist wrote that passage. But there was a type of abortion practiced by the Romans at the time Jesus and St. Paul lived. And no mention of that practice appears in the New Testament (unless you make very imaginative literalist interpretations like Warren did in the example cited). For an honest attempt at a literalist reading, shouldn't the silences in the Christian Scriptures about contemporary practices mean something significant?

Christians and Jews in medieval times both had a concept of "ensoulment", i.e., when a fetus receives a soul, which was a religious version of talking about when a fetus becomes human. As I recall from hearing a presentation on stem cell research at my Catholic parish, medieval Christians regarded something like the 14th week of pregnancy as the time of "ensoulment". So Christians who were many centuries closer to the time of Jesus and Paul didn't consider a fetus to be fully human at the instant of conception, as today's anti-abortion zealots do.

Even as recently as a century or so ago, when laws against abortion were first enacted in the US, it wasn't because abortion was considered murder. It was because the operation was considered unsafe for the pregnant women. For that matter, almost no anti-abortion groups want to treat the pregnant woman who decides for an abortion as a murderer, although the more they get their way, the more they are likely to embrace such a position.

But until we formally become a theocracy, medical realities should dictate public policy. As long as a fetus is incapable of surviving outside the mother's body, it should be the woman's choice whether to terminate the pregnancy. And the anti-abortion Christianists should have the decency not to trash them for it, although the latter is probably too much to hope for.

Jews, the Holocaust and abortion

Christianity in general has plenty of difficulty fitting Jews and Judaism into the Christian worldview.

Conservative Protestants (and Mel Gibson-style Catholics) can get pretty weird about Jews.

What does it mean when Warren and other Christianists compare abortion to the Holocaust? Essentially, that removing a fetus that has no possibility to survive outside the mother's womb is just like killing living, breathing Jews. Which doesn't just vaguely imply but assumes the converse: killing living, breathing Jews is of no more consequence than taking a morning-after pill that prevents a zygote from being implanted in the uterus. There's a definite assumption that Jews aren't fully human in that comparison. (There are other common formulations of the abortion-and-Holocaust argument that argue that abortion is much worse than killing living, breathing Jews.)

Part of it, of course, is the obvious surface meaning. Warren would like to associate the killing of the Holocaust, which has become a paradigm of evil, to abortion and freedom-of-choice laws.

Warren needs to give a little more attention to the sin of Jew-hating, which is rampant among the Christian Right. Jesus himself was a Jew, religiously and by his family heritage, not a Christian.

I was also struck by Warren's statement in that context, "I'm not going to vote for a Holocaust denier". This the kind of double-reverse argument of which the hard right is so fond. Holocaust deniers are almost exclusively rightwingers, certainly in America and Europe. Warren puts liberal Democrat Barack Obama in that role.

Holocaust deniers are also characterized by their shameless disregard for basic empirical facts. So are anti-abortionists and creationists. Warren puts liberal, pro-science Democrat Barack Obama in that role instead.

And Warren says he's Obama's friend?

Warren's anti-abortion politics

Warren has been criticized by liberals for his hardline antigay and antiabortion politics. But his position in the Beliefnet interview is not that these conservative evangelicals who are supposedly concerned about poverty and "creation care" should weigh a variety of factors in deciding for whom to vote. It is that voting for Obama or any other pro-choice politicians (most of whom are Democrats) is like voting for the Holocaust.

This gives strong credence to the suspicions of those who worry that Warren's brand of supposedly moderate Christianism is mainly aimed at getting the Democrats to adopt anti-choice policies on abortion. After this Saddleback appearance and the immediate fallout, I'm going to be very skeptical that Rick Warren is anything more than a standard-issue Christianist who likes to flirt with "post-partisan" rhetoric.

Tags: abortion, barack obama, christian right, christianism,rick warren