Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice
|
|
| The Private Intellectual Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice |
|
|
Friday, December 19, 2008 Conduct Unbecoming a Minister of the Gospel I was pre-emptively weary of the hissy fit the left has thrown in response to Obama picking Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation. You know where to go to find the bills of particulars on this. I wish Obama had been willing to find and validate a person of the cloth who represents a different way to look at religion and politics than Warren gives us, which is basically culture war plus Africa. But--and I'm not complaining here--this is entirely of a piece with Obama's approach to these things, wherein the more you believe in him and the harder you work for him, the less regard he gives you. What's good for him politically, namely, dividing the allegiances of the white evangelical movement, has nothing to do with what would be good for the political and religious culture of the country. And incidentally, all the posturing Obama could possibly do on this stuff will not help him one bit. He bent over backwards to appeal to white evangelicals, who ended up voting for him in lower numbers than they did John Kerry. He will never win them, and as he proved quite impressively last month, he doesn't need them. But anyway, what's most troubling about it is Warren's public endorsement of assassinating Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is pretty vile on its face, of course, and--as a dig to those of us who actually think about these things--a viciously stupid reading of Romans 13 to boot. People like this deserve to be exiled from our public life far more than anyone like Jeremiah Wright, who whatever his failings never called for the murder of a head of government (or anyone else; I think there may be a commandment about that somewhere). But then again, white conservative Christians can say anything they want about any group of people anywhere and it's OK. UPDATE: And as Warren himself points out, everybody played their part: Obama "willingly [took] enormous heat from his base" by selecting an anti-gay, anti-evolution, bloody-minded right-winger to bless his new presidency and everybody gets to feel virtuous because some liberals objected. Pats on the back all around. Welcome to the next eight years. Labels: Christianity, Iran, Obama, rick warren posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:53 AM
Comments:
Post a Comment
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||
|
|||||