Rick Warren is no Billy Graham

Last August I wrote a column critical of Rick Warren's decision to host a presidential candidate forum at his Saddleback Church.

My reasoning then was that America's crisis is moral ambiguity. I argued that Pastor Warren would only contribute to this ambiguity by hosting candidates with opposing views on issues such as abortion and homosexuality and presenting himself as a neutral moderator.

Only Barack Obama would gain, I felt, being showcased as an acceptable candidate by one of the nation's best known evangelical pastors. If John McCain had wanted to clarify his social conservative credentials, he didn't need to go to Rick Warren's church with Barack Obama to do it.

Evangelicals and other Christians listened as Rick Warren called Obama and McCain "friends" and "patriots" and watched as Warren winced no more than would have Larry King when Sen. Obama said it was above his "pay grade" to consider if and when an unborn child has human rights.

Evangelicals had already been hearing from Warren, and left-leaning pastors like Jim Wallis, that they should broaden their primary concerns beyond sex and abortion.

In retrospect, I cannot prove that I was right. But I think the evidence powerfully supports my claim.

Barack Obama picked up five percentage points of the evangelical vote over what John Kerry received in 2004. Those five percentage points amounted to about a third of Obama's winning vote margin over John McCain.

Sure, the Saddleback Forum alone does not explain this shift. But the legitimacy Obama gained that night certainly didn't hurt.

The largest shift was among 18-29 year old evangelicals. Obama got 32 percent of their vote -- double what John Kerry had gotten.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the forum, Warren was oblivious to the vulnerability of this group. The Journal reported, "... as for the notion that younger evangelicals are ready for rebellion against their parents' ideals, Mr. Warren cites polls showing that the younger evangelical generation is even more concerned about abortion than the older one." True. But this was only one part of the picture.

In 2007 the Pew Research Center reported that Republican identification among 18-29 year old white evangelicals had dropped from 55 percent in 2005 to 40 percent.

A survey done by Greenburg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that 26 percent of 18-29 year old evangelicals, compared to 9 percent of those over 30, support same-sex marriage.

Now President-elect Obama has invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. The NY Times calls this an "olive branch to conservative Christian evangelicals" and many now call Warren this era's Billy Graham.

An olive branch? Rick Warren helped get Obama elected and our President-Elect understands that there is still evangelical gold to be mined in the pastor from Saddleback Church.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright can explain how Barack Obama uses pastors. Obama sat in his church for 20 years and used his words for the title of his best-selling book, then discarded him when he became a political liability.

Regarding the Billy Graham comparison, it challenges even the most creative imagination to picture the Rev. Graham's ever hosting a forum for political candidates.

In an interview, Barack Obama recalled a previous invitation to Saddleback Church. "...I was invited to Rick Warren's church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion." I doubt that Billy Graham would see this in the spirit of his own calling to bring the gospel to all who would listen.

Nor would I see the Rev. Graham signing onto the Evangelical Climate Initiative, as has Rick Warren. This gives Christian cover to the left to raise our energy costs to address still-unsubstantiated environmental claims.

But on global warming, Rick Warren and Barack Obama are on the same page. Perhaps these will be the first post-inaugural chips that our new president will call in.

No, I don't agree.

John McCain lost the election, and he lost it quite well on his own. The Republican Party lost the election by nominating him, and the party leadership did quite well at it despite warnings from many "prominent people" and from many of us around here.

Sometimes I wonder if there isn't something to the conspiracy theory that says McCain was Soros' boy just as The Marxist is, and it was his job to lose. I don't know how this theory accounts for the ineptitude of the Republican party, but it's an ineptitude that speaks for itself, isn't it?

Those here at FR who chose not to support John McCain, as you and I did, were exercising their prerogative to not resort to futility and desparation to support a loser.

A self-serving, volatile, and marginally sane loser who ran an entire campaign that sounded like a concession speech.

I WILL pray for Obama as president that he will receive God’s wisdom for the awesome task ahead of him....and for his true conversion to Jesus Christ.

Obama is no Christian. He held his grandmother's memorial (the SECOND one, the one held specifically for Obama after the election) at a Unitarian church.

Read Obama's own comments on religion and the upbringing he got from his mother:

2004 Interview: Obama Talks about Jesus, Heaven and Sin (June 3, 2008)

“OBAMA: Right. Jesus is a historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher. And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.”
Obama: “There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell.”
GG: You don’t believe that?
OBAMA: I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup.
GG: What is sin?
OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham#Religion Religion

A “friend” from high school has said that Dunham “touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue.”[6] Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked if her mother was an atheist, said, “I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”[19] “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”[20]
In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, “My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”[21] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known.”[22] Religion for her was “just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives,” Obama wrote.[20] In 2007 Obama described his mother as “a Christian from Kansas.” “I was raised by my mother,” he continued. “So, I’ve always been a Christian.”[23][24] Also in 2007, he said in a speech, “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution.”[1]

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524-5,00.html

“Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama’s household was not religious. ‘My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew,’ Obama said in a 2007 speech. ‘But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I.’”

I'm going to need to see a baptismal certificate to believe this man was ever a Christian. Certainly he was NOT raised as one by an agnostic mother or non-practicing muslim fathers.

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