Thanks all for your thoughts. A bit of clarification: Flotus did not say “institutional racism impacting poor populations” while in our pulpit, Ijust know a lot about the anti-obesity effort and know that to be an emerging focus within the health community and it is very frustrating. FLOTUS was very sanitized in her presentation as you would expect, but if you look at all the public health efforts including the emerging effort on obesity all are focusing on social justice and institutional racism as underlying causes for the disparities. The problem of course is that then every black and hispanic child and teen growing up comes to think of our nation as racist or at the very least uninformed, and it is insidious. The viewpoint becomes reality and it is to the point already where if you even argue about the causes you are racist. I have had many such conversations and have to proceed very carefully. I can’t imagine Andy or the leadership of the church is aware of any of this, but it is endemic within the public health and health disparities community and it will continue to make our country more polarized.
I hadn’t considered your other points which were very insightful about the implicit endorsement by Andy to all the children in the audience, and there were many from both churches. Great points! Also, I am not at all convinced that the (medical and other)elites who were in the audience will ever consider Christianity because of a nifty program, though they may want to come back, which is the church’s aim. But not to enough of an extent to merit the partnering.
Thanks for the clarification on what was said from the pulpit. Even still, she is not one I would ever trust in our pulpit. I’m beginning to rethink the whole “proud to take the good with the bad” statement. Your questions made me take a very hard look. You know a lot more about what’s going on with the health issues. That’s got to be fun to navigate. :(. Thanks for being on here. I hope others answer your questions.