Entries for January 2009

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Focus on the Family has hired Tim Goeglein, the former chief liaison to Christian right groups from the George W. Bush White House to be its new Washington representative, Christianity Today reports. Goeglein left during the administration's final year after admitting to widespread plagiarizing..

Largely unknown to the public, Goeglein was probably the most important permanent link in the Bush administration for conservative Christian groups that provided a crucial support base for President Bush. For two decades, Goeglein had penned an occasional column for his hometown Indiana paper, the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. In 2008, the newspaper found that Goeglein has plagiarized dozens of the columns.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Earlier this week, I noted that the website for Sarah Palin's new PAC is silent on her faith and on faith-based issues--two of her greatest political assets--and wondered aloud about the explanation.

Spiritual Politic's Mark Silk has an answer:

. . . movement evangelicals like Huckabee and Palin don't need to advertise who they are to the movement. They do feel the need to veil it from everybody else. That's why no one could manage to lay hands on the sermons Huck gave when he was a Baptist minister. And why Palin was so exceptionally vague about her religious views and attachments during the campaign. Is anyone fooled? Nope.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

President Barack Obama will speak at next Thursday's annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, according to event organizers and a White House aide. The breakfast has drawn the sitting U.S. president every year since the Eisenhower administration, according to an organizer who would speak about the event only on background. It's customary for the president to address the gathering. The event's planners are forbidden to talk publicly about the breakfast, which is expected to draw about 4,000 guests--including a smattering of heads of state--to the Hilton Washington's ballroom next week.

"There's excitement about Obama's because it's not the first breakfast he's attended," said one organizer. "He's not coming in cold."

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

The New York Times is reporting that Joshua DuBois, the religious outreach director for Obama's presidential campaign, will be named faith-based initiatives director.

This from the Times:

President Obama plans to name Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal pastor and political strategist who handled religious outreach for the Obama campaign, to direct a revamped office of faith-based initiatives, according to religious leaders who have been informed about the choice.

The office, created by President George W. Bush by executive order at the start of his first term, is likely to have an even broader mandate in the Obama White House, said the religious leaders, who requested anonymity because the appointment has yet to be announced.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Gallup is out with a fascinating new ranking of the most and least religious states in the nation. The pollster asked 350,000 Americans a simple question: "Is religion an important part of your daily life?"

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Notice any conspicuous omissions from the homepage of the political action committee Sarah Palin launched yesterday? There's no mention of her faith, her pro-life stance, or any other testaments to her religious conservative bona fides, which is what largely made her such an attractive candidate to the Republican base. The site does mention her commitment to education, health care, energy independence, and government reform.

I'm always struck by how little the GOP publicly beats the drum on faith or social issues, given the huge role those forces play in the party's base and as the Democrats talk about them more and more. Republicans probably figure they've already got that based locked up.

But does the GOP risk alienating that base if they ignore it and their issues entirely? Some religious conservatives in the GOP charged John McCain with such negligence during the presidential campaign. And reading this month's trenchant cover story on Palin in Charisma magazine, I couldn't help but notice an important voice missing: Palin's. She hadn't granted Charisma an interview. Is the Alaska Governor the latest to give the GOP's conservative Christian base the cold shoulder? Charisma is the leading publication for charismatic Christians—George W. Bush granted an interview during his first presidential campaign—and Palin hasn't exactly been media shy since the election.

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

I recently wrote a piece—my first God & Country column for U.S. News's new digital weekly—titled the "Ted Haggard You Dont Know." It laid out Alexandra Pelosi's case, made in her new documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard, for showing a little Christian charity toward the disgraced evangelical leader. She and Haggard take his old church, New Life, to task for treating the admitted sinner so shabbily. Here are the relevant graphs: 

For all the archival footage it digs up of him denouncing homosexuality and sermonizing about the dangers of dealing in lies and deception, Pelosi presents Haggard—a man now loathed by evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike—as a sympathetic character in need of a little Christian charity. "No one wants him," Pelosi told me. "The gays won't embrace him unless he says he's gay, and the Christians won't embrace him because he says he has problems with his sexuality."