August 17th 2008
Skewed Perspective On Saddleback Forum
N
o Sunday Scan this week – more on that in my next post – but before getting to that, I had to share with you a bit of what those who hold the radical view that there should be no religion in politics said about yesterday’s McCain/Obama Saddleback Forum.
There are zillions of examples because the blogosphere skews left, but I chose as my one Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh’s Are We Now Officially a Christian Nation? Walsh does not feel Obama should have attended the forum at all:
I’m not sure why Obama voluntarily sat down for a nationally televised conversation about his private religious faith with a relatively conservative Christian leader, as though that’s a reasonable station of the cross, so to speak, for a major American presidential candidate.
If we take the incredulous question of her column’s title at face value – that America is not a Christian nation “officially” – perhaps Walsh has a point. If we must “officially” be a Christian nation in order to talk about faith, then we have a problem because we have no official religion. However, we are undeniably a nation made up overwhelmingly of Christians, not an official Christian nation, a truth the secularists try hard to avoid.
Their decades-long effort to reinterpret “separation of church and state” has made normal conversations and exhibits of faith a social faux pas, necessitating the need for things like the Saddleback Forum, which will help to nudge the pendulum back to a more natural state.
What’s strange about Walsh’s column, and the Left’s take on the Forum generally, is how off the perception is:
And while “Pastor Rick” went out of his way to say Obama and McCain were his personal friends, I personally perceived Warren as mildly pro-McCain. I thought Warren hurried Obama through his answers. Maybe not intentionally. He sat there and went “um-hm” and “hmmm” and “OK” and “yeah” literally every few seconds throughout a lot of Obama’s early answers — maybe trying to be fair, to show empathy; maybe because he himself wasn’t quite comfortable. Either way, it had the effect of feeling as if he was rushing Obama.
Obama was rushed? His rambling answers in search of a position went so long that McCain actually had the chance to answer two questions Pastor Rick Warren didn’t have time to ask Obama. If Warren had rushed Obama, he might have had the chance to answer these questions.
On the other hand, Warren didn’t have time for a “hmmm” or “um-hm” while McCain shotgunned his direct answers.
For all her odd perspective, Walsh got two things right:
While I appreciated Obama declaring himself pro-choice before this crowd, I thought by far his worst answer was on the question of when life begins, when he replied: “Answering that question is above my pay grade.” That quip could haunt him; nothing is above the president’s pay grade.
She got that right. Google coughed up 242,000 hits this morning for “Obama above my pay grade.”
The other thing she got right?
Still, I’d call McCain the winner tonight. He used the forum to punch home his message, while Obama delivered a soft getting-to-know-you pitch.
Posted in 2008, McCain, Obama, Religion, Separation of Church & State | No Comments yet » | |
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