Is Focus on the Family Warming to Obama?

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

The Obama team has long embraced David Brody, the Christian Broadcasting Network's political correspondent and blogger. Obama gave him four separate interviews (!) during the course of the 2008 campaign.

Which partly explains why Brody has a kinder take on the Obama administration than what you'd expect from a born-again Christian working for a TV network founded by Pat Robertson. Watch a Brody segment or spend a minute on his blog and you'll usually get a balanced and, sometimes, sympathetic picture of the goings-on at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

It's a stark contrast to the portrait typically offered by the conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family. In a recent update to supporters, Focus on the Family Action described the Obama White House and Democratic-controlled Washington this way: "You know all about the assault on family values that has begun in Washington. The reality of 'change' has hit full-force, and in many respects, it's a nightmare."

But Focus's CitizenLink website has posted an interview with CBN's Brody about the Obama administration, and Brody, as per usual, gives a pretty evenhanded account. The surprising part is that Focus ran it. Coupled with Focus's out-and-out praise for Obama last week on adoption, it could be more evidence that Focus is working toward some kind of détente with the administration.

Here's an excerpt from the Brody interview:

Do you sense that administration officials, members of Congress and other people on the inside of Washington are a little out of touch with mainstream America?
It would depend who you asked. This White House is very aware that they need to get out of Washington quite a bit. They understand that the president plays well in the heartland, so he wants to get back out there....

Give me a measure of the president, because a lot of us on the conservative side don't know what to think. We hear speeches like he made at Notre Dame, where he wants to find middle ground. We see a difference between his rhetoric and legislation. What's your sense of all that?
There are two points to take away from all of this. I've interviewed him four times, and I can tell you this: He is a very nuanced gentleman. In other words, he sees 10 to 11 sides of an argument. It's not so black and white with him. That drives people nuts sometimes, but it also endears him to many folks because you can't pigeonhole him.

Because he's a constitutional law professor, he's going to argue all sides of an issue to the point where eventually you're going to have to make a decision, and most of the time it ends up more on the liberal end of the spectrum. But because he's not so black and white, it's harder to figure him out sometimes.

What's the one issue that evangelicals need to start paying attention to that maybe is a little bit off our radar?
Even though we've heard talk about abortion and common ground, what's going under the radar right now are the negotiations as to what this abortion-reduction initiative is going to include. At the White House every week or so, they're holding conference calls with moderate evangelicals—even some conservative evangelicals—as to what is any sort of White House abortion-reduction initiative going to look like. Will this be a bill they try to push through Congress? What's in the package? And the devil's in the details.

If this is going to be a bunch of "pro-choice" recycled language about family planning and more government money for Planned Parenthood, then it's a nonstarter for many folks in the evangelical community. And the Obama administration wants to make sure they're reaching out to conservative evangelicals, as well. They are well aware that they need to do that. But the question is what do they do exactly?

I'm not saying it's gushing toward Obama, just a whole lot more generous than Focus has been in the past.

The rest is here.

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