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Whose Christianity? Which? Monday, Jun 30, 2008 By John Brummett Barack Obama has been caught red-handed espousing an expansive rather than restrictive view of Christianity. Even worse, we have before us prima facie evidence of Obama's advocating an America where we would keep the application of our religious values highly generalized. That's because, you see, specific views tend to vary widely from denomination to denomination, church to church, Jew to Christian, Christian to Christian, Baptist to Baptist, pewmate to pewmate. Why, sometimes these views can diverge moment to moment inside the thoughtful and searching mind of one person. As Obama put it in his book, The Audacity of Hope, and later in a speech to the liberal Christian group called Sojourners, we are not by constitutional definition a Christian nation. We are a free-religion nation. But even if we resolve to behave as a Christian nation, Obama wrote and later said in that speech, we'd have to decide which version of Christianity, James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's, to practice. In that speech, Obama quoted a couple of the zanier Old Testament passages and wondered if we really would want our government to impose such things. One of them, in Leviticus, might make slavery all right. Another seems to make eating shellfish an abomination. Obama also made the point that, if we took the Sermon on the Mount into the Pentagon for literal application, presuming to bless the meek and the poor in spirit and the peacemakers, we might encounter a little resistance from a general or two. You see his point? Christianity, as it's universally asserted, can encompass an ocean of conflicting thought and practice. George W. Bush boasts of his Christianity. But he might not be what you'd typically call a blessed peacemaker. Dobson, lobbying preacher for the right-wing Focus on the Family, is of that intolerant, fundamentalist, restrictive view of Christianity - his way or hell's way. He believes he is commanded by God and Christ to impose his intolerant, fundamentalist, restrictive view on our politics and government. Sharpton's version is, well, I'm not sure. It has something to do with race and with seeking publicity. It's different from Dobson's. On that we can surely agree. Obama was saying let's not dare leave our religious values out of our politics, for that's not possible anyway, but let's leave out of our politics any imposition of one man's theological opinions on another. Dobson didn't like that one bit. It probably irked him to be thrown in the same sentence with Sharpton. He also used his radio show to charge that Obama had trivialized Christianity by misrepresenting or ridiculing Holy Scripture, the very word of God, and outrageously calling for keeping Christianity out of our politics. Mike Huckabee, noted preacher-politician, then went on Fox News to comment that it was not a matter of personal judgment, but one of God's command, that we not permit, as Obama would, what Huckabee called "partial view abortion." That was a newly incendiary and tactical Republican term - "partial view." This refers to when a doctor and a mother, concerned about the mother's health if not necessarily her life, will choose to abort a fetus at the very latest moment. It's gruesome, which is why so-called Christian conservatives like to bring it up. Personally, I do not presume to know what God thinks about the various reasons for ending pregnancy. I do not know what He decrees on the issue of when human life begins. But I do know that religion is about more than that, and that Christianity is about more than that, and that the selection of the next president of an expansive, free-religion and constitutionally tolerant nation ought to be about more than that. ------- John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
