Associated Baptist Press - 6/27/2008

Associated Baptist Press
June 27, 2008 (8-66)

IN THIS ISSUE:
Analysis: Dobson confused at best about Obama speech, defenders say
Name connects East Texas church with Middle Eastern Christians
Opinion: America’s moral center says ‘no’ to torture

Analysis: Dobson confused at best about Obama speech, defenders say
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- James Dobson thinks that Barack Obama holds to a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution’s religion clauses -- but Dobson’s own interpretation of a two-year-old Obama speech that occasioned the critique may be far fruitier.

That’s what Obama’s defenders are saying, backed up by some journalists and experts in religion and politics. Nonetheless, some on the Religious Right have leapt to Dobson’s defense.

In his June 24 radio program, the Focus on the Family founder harshly criticized Obama’s understanding of religion’s role in American politics as well as his understanding of the Bible.

“What [Obama is] trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe,” Dobson said on the broadcast, which reportedly garners millions of daily listeners on Christian radio. “And if I can’t get everyone to agree with me, it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. That is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution!”

The Obama speech that Dobson used as the springboard for his criticism was delivered in June 2006 to a Washington conference of moderate and liberal Christian anti-poverty activists. In it, he addressed his view of the proper role of religion in influencing public policy.

But in the speech the Illinois senator, now the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, actually criticized liberals and secularists who try to divorce religious motivations and imagery from public policy.

“At times, we try to avoid the conversation about religion altogether, afraid to offend anyone. At worst, there are some who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant [and perpetuate] a caricature of religious Americans,” he said.

But, Obama noted, “the majority of great reformers in American history were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Nonetheless, he cautioned religious conservatives who would try to argue for a policy simply on biblical grounds, without broadening their appeal to those who might not share their faith or interpretation of Scripture.

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values,” Obama said. “It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

That passage specifically provoked Dobson’s “fruitcake” comment. He said Obama was asserting an argument that would require Christians “to go to the lowest common denominator of morality” when advocating causes in the public square.

That attack is utterly off-base, said one Christian leader whose organization sponsored the conference at which Obama delivered the speech in question. “There’s certainly a misunderstanding, a misreading of what Barack said,” said Jim Wallis, head of the Call to Renewal/Sojourners organization. “If anything, he was defending the right of people of faith to bring their religious understandings into the public square; the question was, ‘how we do that?’”

A group of Christian pastors, led by Houston minister Kirbyjon Caldwell, has launched a site – jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com – for other Christians to sign a statement denouncing Dobson’s attack. Caldwell, a United Methodist, has endorsed Obama, but has supported President Bush in the past.

Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family’s vice-president for public policy, appeared on the show with Dobson and echoed many of his criticisms. In a June 27 telephone interview, he said that the criticism was valid because Obama was trying to have it both ways in the speech.

“The speech has a very inconsistent message – he flip-flops back and forth; he says, ‘Of course we can bring religious speech into the debate,’ but then he says elsewhere in the speech that you have to define our arguments in universal terms,” Minnery said.

“When people do express beliefs in language accessible to all, many times the secular left discounts them -- for example, on the intelligent-design argument,” he continued, referencing attempts by many conservative Christians in recent years to influence the way evolution is taught. Intelligent-design theory teaches that some life forms are so naturally complex that they could not have evolved spontaneously without the help of some unseen architect or designer. Most mainstream scientists and educators counter that it is simply creationism in disguise.

But one expert journalist said Minnery and Dobson were distorting the candidate’s argument. “What Obama said was that in a pluralistic America, religious believers cannot reasonably expect to create majorities for their favorite policy prescriptions -- ‘moral principles’ in Dobson's terms -- unless they couch their arguments in terms that can be understood and appreciated by and persuasive to people other than believers,” wrote Don Wycliff, a Notre Dame University journalism professor, in a June 27 opinion piece for the Chicago Tribune. “There's nothing complicated about that -- unless your purpose is not to understand but to play politics.”

Wallis said Dobson’s argument has theocratic undertones.

“It assumes, underneath, that perhaps Dobson is kind of supporting a notion of Christian theocracy where, in fact, Christians – by just appealing to their revelation, their Bible – [that] their view has to prevail. And what I say is that those Christians don’t get to win just because they’re Christians.” He said. “So, you have to argue about the common good. That’s what Barack said, ant that’s why I also say that you have to frame your religious convictions in moral terms that are accessible to more people.”

But Minnery contended that that makes no sense in a country whose founding principles, he believes, are inextricably linked with Christianity.

“Let’s just think about something here: ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ That’s a very religious statement -- and that was affirmed in the Old Testament and reaffirmed in the New Testament. That’s the law of the land. Murder is illegal; should we get rid of the laws against murder because they originate in a religious document?” he asked.

Minnery noted that many of the nation’s monuments contain references to God as the source of law and human rights. “When Sen. Obama says that we have to make our case in universal language that is accessible by all by those who believe and those who don’t believe, I say that you can’t do that in this country -- especially when you’ve got so many of these statements carved in stone in the U.S. Capitol.”

Dobson and Minnery also expressed great offense at another passage of the speech in which Obama dismisses the idea that the nation’s laws can, in any substantial way, be based on a generic Christianity.

“Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation. At least not just [Christians]. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers,” Obama said. “And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would it be James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton’s?”

On the program, Minnery said that Obama, in that passage, “diminished” both Christianity and Dobson.

“Well, I say, ‘Excuse me?’ Seventy-six percent of the people identify themselves as Christian. There are only six-tenths of 1 percent who are Muslim, seven-tenths of 1 percent who are Buddhist, four-tenths of 1 percent who are Hindu…. So he's diminishing the idea that people of Christian faith have anything to say. And then he begins to diminish you,” Minnery said.

Asked if he believes non-Christians are somehow less American than Christians, Minnery said, “Nobody’s saying that -- in fact, Christians are the first to believe that we operate under a civil government, not a Christian government, not a theocracy. But it’s a civil government, meaning all have an equal right to participate, and sometimes the charge comes from the left that Christians want to impose their government on all.”

But that’s not the case, Minnery said. “We want to have an equal access to the ballot box.”

On the show, Minnery and Dobson took particular umbrage at what they perceived as Obama’s equation of Dobson with Sharpton, the controversial Baptist minister and civil-rights leader.

“[H]e has compared you somehow as being on the right what Al Sharpton is on the left. Al Sharpton achieved his notoriety in the '80s and '90s by engaging in racial bigotry, and many people have called him a black racist,” Minnery said. “And he is somehow equating you with that and racial bigotry.”

Dobson seemed to think Obama had implied that he wanted to eject non-Christians from the country. “Obviously, that is offensive to me,” Dobson said. “I mean, who wants to expel people who are not Christians? Expel them from what? From the country? Deprive them of constitutional rights? Is that what he thinks I want to do? Why'd this man jump on me? I haven't said anything anywhere near that.”

But to one student of religion and politics, any fair reading of Obama’s speech shows that Dobson is taking offense at something that isn’t there. “I mean, was Obama launching any kind of ad hominem attack against Dobson? I really don’t think so,” said Laura Olson, a Clemson University political scientist and expert in the Religious Right. “In a way, Dobson could read the fact that Obama mentioned him as a compliment because he is the most obvious person right now to attach to that political movement.”

On the obvious level, Olson said, Dobson’s understanding of Obama’s comments represents two vastly different ways of looking at the world. “Obama’s interpretation of religion and the proper place of religion and the public square is fundamentally different than that of Dobson,” she said.

But, on a deeper level, Olson added, “what makes this interesting is, you know, why is Dobson … talking about it now? Why is he choosing to make this an issue?

“The way I’m interpreting this is that,….Dobson is, I’m sure, a little bit -- if a not a lot -- concerned.”

That’s because of the host of younger evangelical leaders who have begun to embrace a broader political agenda than the anti-abortion, anti-gay positions that have been the hallmarks of the Religious Right, Olson said.

“Dobson obviously has inserted himself into politics in recent times -- endorsing [President] Bush the last time -- so what’ he’s doing now, I think, you know is a continuation of that and perhaps kind of a defensive move to suggest to his listeners, ‘Hey, I bet there’s some of you out there in my listening public who might be attracted to Sen. Obama, who might be swayed by his rhetoric which is, at minimum, a lot better than the religious rhetoric that we’ve seen from a Democratic candidate in a long time.’”

Wallis said that was exactly what Dobson was trying to do. “This speech is two years old, it got lots of publicity at the time, and I can’t imagine that Dobson didn’t hear about it at the time, because it got a lot of attention,” he said. “So, all I can conclude is that really the issue here is indeed political -- that James Dobson and other members of the Religious Right are really threatened by the changing agenda of evangelicals.”

However, Dobson has also been critical of Arizona Sen. John McCain, Obama’s Republican rival. Minnery said that the speech had only come to his attention in recent weeks due to Focus on the Family staffers. On the program, Dobson said video clips of Obama’s speech have “gone viral” in Christian circles on the Internet.

“So little is known about Sen. Barack Obama that every public speech like this of his is significant simply because we have not heard many of his speeches like this prior to the presidential campaign,” Minnery said in the interview.

Asked about the assessment that the incident shows Dobson is worried that his influence over the Religious Right -- and politics as a whole -- is slipping away, Minnery said that didn’t matter.

“Whether he is a leader or not is up to God.” He said. “God has directed this ministry for many years. And we don’t decide those things.”

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Name connects East Texas church with Middle Eastern Christians
By Carrie Joynton

PALESTINE, Texas (ABP) -- For the members of First Baptist Church in Palestine, Texas, sharing names with a Middle Eastern territory has led to a connection with Christians on the West Bank.

It began a few years ago. Pastor Jay Abernathy said a BBC news team taking a Sunday detour from President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, gave him the idea to capitalize on the shared name.

“We invited [the BBC team] to our church that Sunday while they were out at the president’s ranch,” Abernathy said. The team asked him if the people in Palestine, Texas, ever associated themselves with Middle Eastern Palestinians. Abernathy said he had never really thought about the name connection.

“That was kind of a catalyst,” Breck Quarles, chairman of the church’s missions committee, said of the BBC visit.

In 2005, a church member alerted Abernathy and Quarles that a Palestinian minister was traveling in Texas and wanted to know if he could speak at their church. After a brief meeting, church leaders at First Baptist agreed.

Munir Kakish told the other Palestinians about needs among his ministries overseas. He lived eight years in an orphanage in Ramallah, located ten miles north of Jerusalem on the West Bank, following his father’s death. After traveling to the United States for college in 1967, he returned to the Holy Land and began ministry there with his wife, Sharon, in 1978.

Kakish now serves as pastor for two Palestinian churches -- one in Ramallah, the other in Ramla -- and as founder and director of Home of New Life, a boys’ home in Ramallah.

The Texas church showed Kakish overwhelming support.

“We brought in that morning several thousand dollars to get kids enrolled in school. It was a confirmation from us that the church was behind what they were doing,” Quarles said.

Quarles and Abernathy visited the West Bank in May 2006. Upon their return, the Texas church confirmed a mutually supportive relationship with Christians in Palestine “in a number of different areas … with commitments to pray,” Quarles said.

Despite small numbers and a low budget, First Baptist in Palestine consistently finds resources to support Palestinian Christian ministries through donations and regular visits.

“I’m kind of amazed at how much gets done with a church this size. We don’t really have any money. God gets it done,” Abernathy said. “We’re just kind of your average Baptist church in Texas.”

In May, Abernathy and church member Steve Jenkins traveled to the West Bank with a team from Buckner International -- a Texas Baptist benevolent agency -- to explore possibilities of working with at-risk children there. Representatives from First Baptist in Palestine have returned overseas three times since the first visit in May 2006.

First Baptist member Linda Love said the experience changed her life.

“It was such an incredible eye-opener,” Love said.

Love ventured to the West Bank in 2007 with Quarles and fellow church member Cameron Cline. Interacting with Palestinian Christians gave her “a new perspective on life,” Love said. Instead of the often-negative stereotypes of Palestinians, Love said she encountered a people “so delightful and so generous.”

“It just gave me a totally different picture,” she said.

Increasing awareness and understanding among American evangelicals of the Palestinian Christian community motivates Abernathy to spread the word about ministry activity in the Middle East.

“A lot of folks just aren’t really aware of how many Arab evangelical Christians are out there,” Abernathy noted. “We met a very vibrant group of evangelical Baptist Christians [in the Middle East], but they felt kind of forgotten.”

“They need our prayers. They need our support. We serve the same Lord; we serve the same Savior,” Quarles said.

As an unexpected result of their partnership with Christians in Palestine, First Baptist in Palestine has attracted the attention of Arab exchange students in local Texas schools.

“There’s a number of exchange students -- all of them Muslim -- who feel totally comfortable coming to First Baptist. They come because they’re either staying at a church member’s home, or they get invited at school,” Quarles said. “They’ll stay, and they feel at home. They sense something there.”

The exchange of culture and Christian fellowship between these two otherwise-foreign communities has forged a bond that shapes their members’ lives and worldviews. It’s an opportunity sent by God, Quarles said.

“I’m just amazed that God opened up the door for us to do that. I’m blessed to go to a church that is open to what God’s doing, and is willing to take a step of faith.”

For Love, that “step of faith” has given her a greater vision of the world and its people.

“I think one of the main things is that we are to treat all people equally and fairly, as the Lord would. That’s an awakening for anyone,” Love said. “God calls us to seek the spirit, seek the soul of every person.”

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-- Carrie Joynton is a communications intern for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Opinion: America’s moral center says ‘no’ to torture
By David Gushee

(ABP) – An unprecedented bipartisan coalition of religious, political, and military leaders recently released a document expressing our shared rejection of torture and prisoner mistreatment by -- or in the name of -- the United States.

The signatories include former secretaries of state George Shultz, Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, former defense secretaries Harold Brown, William Perry, and William Cohen, four former members of the Defense Department’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and dozens of other flag officers of the U.S. armed forces, along with former senators Sam Nunn, John Glenn, and others. Religious leaders include top Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical leaders.

I have also signed the document.

Our “Declaration of Principles for a Presidential Executive Order on Prisoner Treatment, Torture and Cruelty” affirms six key principles that we believe must govern U.S. policy on prisoner treatment, and asks President Bush to issue an executive order based on them. The principles are the Golden Rule, a single national standard, the rule of law, the duty to protect, checks and balances, and clarity and accountability.

-- The Golden Rule principle affirms that our nation will not use any methods of interrogation that we would not find acceptable if used against Americans.

-- The one national standard principle means that all U.S. personnel and agencies will apply the same standards for interrogation, with no exceptions for the CIA or any other agency. Currently, the best expression of a reasonably humane standard is found in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which explicitly bans a number of cruel interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.

-- Adherence to the rule of law requires that the United States will acknowledge all prisoners to our courts and the Red Cross, rejects any use of secret prisons or the mysterious disappearance of prisoners, and requires fully adequate judicial processes for detainees to prove their innocence.

-- The duty to protect means a reaffirmation not just of our own rejection of torture, but of our responsibility to protect people in our custody from being tortured by other countries after transfer from our government.

-- The principle of checks and balances reaffirms the legitimate role of the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government in understanding, reviewing, and -- in some cases -- setting detention policies.

-- Finally, the emphasis on clarity and accountability means that all U.S. personnel involved in relating to prisoners must operate with total clarity as to the legal rules under which they do so and with full understanding that all who violate those rules will be held accountable, regardless of rank or position.

The over 50 evangelical leaders who signed this declaration of principles along with 150 other national leaders represent many of our country’s leading Christian institutions. They are academics, denominational leaders, pastors, writers, activists, evangelists and missionaries. In obedience to Christ, they give each day to the work of loving God and loving neighbor as they have been commanded in Scripture. They are theologically orthodox and most are not particularly politically inclined, though undoubtedly they represent Republicans and Democrats and independents.

None of us who have become involved in this fight expected or wanted to have to engage the issue of prisoner treatment and torture in the war on terror.

But when we discovered to our horror that our nation had slipped into policies permitting torture and cruelty in our name, and related policies that involved the systematic mistreatment of prisoners and denial of their basic human rights, we had to respond. My own group, Evangelicals for Human Rights, began offering such a response in the summer of 2006 and we have been working to help evangelicals bear a clear Christian witness on this issue since that time. Participation in the development of this declaration of principles represents a high-water mark for our efforts, which will continue until policies that reflect the six principles of this document have become the policies of the United States.

Everyone who signed this document did so for their own reasons. But the evangelical signatories probably all share in common this basic cluster of motivations: We have all committed our lives to be faithful followers of Christ; he comes first, and we must do what he wants us to do. We have all come to believe that a follower of the Jesus who came as an expression of God’s great love for humanity cannot endorse or accept the torture or cruel treatment of any human being. Torture, like terrorism itself, is a grotesque violation of everything Jesus represents and that we have committed to be about in the world.

I personally believe that the statement -- and the nature and quality of the signatories from so many sectors of American society -- marks a decisive moral rejection of torture from what might be called the moral center of American culture. It is, of course, deeply encouraging that people whose lives have been devoted to protecting our nation’s security and advancing our interests in military and government service also agree that torture and cruelty do not make our nation safer or stronger. Together, then, we are saying that we must recover our moral bearings as a nation and reject policies that have both degraded us morally and harmed our national interest.

Fear, anger, and grief after 9/11 sent us off-course. But now our nation is recovering its moral compass once again.

To learn more about how the United States descended into torture and how we can get past it, come to our conference on “Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul” at Mercer University September 11th and 12th. Information is available at www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org.

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-- David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com