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Interview: Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land on Obama Transition Team's Religious Outreach Offensive
Tweet Share on Facebook December 30, 2008 Comment (3)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
For my story today on the Obama transition team reaching out actively to religious groups as it crafts a policy agenda and prepares to set up its own version of the Bush White House's Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, I wanted to know if conservative religious groups were receiving the same red-carpet treatment as their faith-based counterparts on the left. So, I called Richard Land, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest evangelical denomination. Here's our interview. Excerpts:
Some traditionally liberal religious groups have attended a dozen meetings so far with the Obama transition team. Have you or others at the Southern Baptist Convention been invited to those meetings?
I did receive a phone call from Mr. [Joshua] Dubois [the Obama transition team's director of religious affairs] and he wanted to thank me for my letter to the president-elect. I sent him an open letter that's on our website. The gist was that I hoped that he understood that there are tens of millions of Americans that didn't vote for him that are nevertheless delighted that an African-American has been elected president; that despite our racist past, this election says something kind and noble about America; that we were going to pray for him and for his safety and wisdom; that we are going to support him where we could, and that when we aren't able to do that, we're going to use our constitutional right to push for alternative policies. -
Focus on the Family Pulls Interview With Mormon Glenn Beck
Tweet Share on Facebook December 30, 2008 Comment (60)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
The Mormon Times reports that Focus on the Family has pulled an interview with conservative radio and TV personality Glenn Beck from one of its websites because supporters of the evangelical group complained that it appeared to endorse Mormonism, Beck's religious tradition.
Reading the interview—occasioned by Beck's new book, The Christmas Sweater—I'm surprised that Focus didn't see this controversy coming. In its introduction to the interview, Focus notes that "Beck spent several years addicted to drugs and alcohol, coming to the verge of suicide, before turning his life over to God at the age of 35."
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Was the Democratic Party's 'Religion Problem' Born of Bad Intentions?
Tweet Share on Facebook December 30, 2008 Comment (8)Over at Street Prophets, Pastordan admits that the Democrats may have had a religion problem that the 2004 election results woke them up to. But he can't stand the Democratic faith consultants who parrot the Republican line that Democratic leaders are somehow antireligious:
While there may be some validity to the charges that Democrats needed to "get" religion in the 2000s, the people who push that line of thinking tend to be political moderates with an interest in selling the party advice on religious outreach. They tend to do that in ways that impute bad intentions to Democratic party leaders,* and in ways that reinforce Republican narratives about the party. To my mind, that's bad for progressive ideas, and it's bad faith argument, if you'll excuse the expression. I'd like to hear Dan address that point in his next post.
First off, it appears that on the part of some Democratic leaders, there were some bad intentions. When then presidential candidate Howard Dean's faith outreach director, Mara Vanderslice, introduced herself to Dean's top advisers in the 2004 race, one adviser looked at her point blank and said, "How the hell did you get hired?"
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President-Elect Obama's Church Attendance Grinds to a Halt
Tweet Share on Facebook December 29, 2008 Comment (8)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
For all his talking and writing about the important role of religion in his life, Barack Obama has not attended church on Sunday since becoming president-elect, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The story includes helpful historical comparisons with the churchgoing habits of other recent presidents-elect during transition time:
As a president-elect, Bill Clinton frequently attended church services in Little Rock in 1992. And George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, helped to serve communion during a Christmas Eve service in 2000 at their hometown church in Austin, Texas.
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Another Influential Social Conservative Praises Obama—That Makes 7
Tweet Share on Facebook December 29, 2008 Comment (6)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
I recently wrote that Barack Obama showed how to defang the religious right in a single week. More evidence arrives today, from New York Times columnist William Kristol, a social conservative (among other kinds):
. . . I look forward to Obama's inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.
For one thing, there will be the invocation, delivered by Rick Warren. I suspect he'll be careful to say nothing pro-life or pro-traditional-marriage—but we conservatives have already gotten more than enough pleasure from the hysterical reaction to his selection by the tribunes of the intolerant left. And having Warren there will, in fact, be a welcome reminder of the strides the evangelical movement and religious conservatives (broadly speaking) have made in recent decades.
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The GOP's 'Democrats=Secularists' Campaign Had Some Truth
Tweet Share on Facebook December 29, 2008 Comment (6)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Pastordan at Street Prophets says I mischaracterized his position in criticizing him for painting the post-2004 Democratic faith outreach blitz/resurgent religious left as a PR campaign. It's not the recent faith-based activity on the left that constitutes a PR campaign, Pastordan says, but the decades-long effort of the Republican Party and religious right to paint the Democrats as secular fundamentalists:
The Republican party waged a decades-long branding operation to make "liberal" a dirty word, in part by making it synonymous with "godless heathen" or some such. You can actually see the perception of the Democratic party as being "friendly to religion" dip as Karl Rove's marketing kicked into high gear ahead of the 2004 election. It's come back up since—just less than 40% of the population agrees Dems like faith these days—and yes, that's in part because the RIC made enough noise to change some perceptions.
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Why the Religious Left and Democratic Faith Outreach is More Than PR
Tweet Share on Facebook December 26, 2008 Comment (7)There’s a debate playing out in the liberal blogosphere’s churchier corners in reaction to a recent Daily Beast post from Mike McCurry, the onetime Clinton White House press secretary, titled “How my Party Found God.”
The subhead on the piece sums it up well:
Liberals have practiced secular politics since the 1960s, but with the ascent of Barack Obama, the left discovered it can actually keep the faith.
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Obama Shows How to Defang the Christian Right in a Week
Tweet Share on Facebook December 24, 2008 Comment (14)By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Is it just me, or in the course of the last week has Barack Obama pretty masterfully neutralized the Christian right campaign to paint him as a lefty bogeyman?
Consider:
1. The president-elect's invitation to Rick Warren, the most influential evangelical in the nation, to give the invocation at his inauguration, and Obama's decision to firmly stand by the choice even after the outcry it generated among gays and on the left.
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The Story Behind the Lincoln Bible at Obama's Inauguration
Tweet Share on Facebook December 23, 2008 Comment (9)I spoke with Clark Evans, the Library of Congress's head of reference services, rare books, and special collections division, about the Abraham Lincoln Bible that Barack Obama will be sworn in on at his inauguration next month. Excerpts:
This wasn't Lincoln's personal Bible?
It was not the Lincoln family Bible. That was probably traveling by train from Springfield [Lincoln's hometown, in Illinois] to Washington, so he had no personal copy of the Bible available for his inauguration on March 4, 1861. But William Thomas Carroll, clerk of the Supreme Court, had a few Bibles available. He'd given the same edition, published in Oxford in 1853, but a different copy to James Buchanan.Did Lincoln hold on to the Bible afterward?
After the inauguration, it remained with William Thomas Carroll and his wife, Sally. We don't know when the Carrolls passed it back to Abraham and Mary Lincoln, but it would have been shortly thereafter. Carroll was not just a passing acquaintance to the Lincoln family. When Lincoln's son Willie died in 1862, the Carrolls offered their vault in Georgetown for the body, and it remained there until 1865, when his body and Lincoln's went from Washington to Springfield. [The Bible] remained with the Lincoln family until 1928, when the wife of Robert Todd Lincoln, who died in 1926 and was the only Lincoln son to make it to adulthood, gave it to the library. -
Pro-Lifers Inundate Obama Website With Comments
Tweet Share on Facebook December 23, 2008 Comment (65)The president of Americans United for Life, Charmaine Yoest, gave God & Country a heads-up that pro-lifers have inundated the Obama transition team's website with comments opposing passage of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would codify Roe v. Wade and strike down abortion restrictions currently on the books.
When she sent the E-mail last night, Yoest says, there were fewer than 200 comments responding to a memo titled "Advancing Reproductive Rights and Health in a New Administration," on the Obama site, change.gov. Now, there are almost 2,000 comments. Most—almost all, in fact—appear to be from abortion rights opponents. Here's a sampling of posts from today: