OUR NEW PRESIDENT HAS his work cut out—a looming depression to avert or weather, eight years of failed foreign policy to correct, a crumbling infrastructure, global warming, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
And, in the midst of all that, he has to cope with yet another loose cannon preacher.
This time it's Rick Warren, who has accepted a gracious invitation from Barack Obama to give the prayer at his inauguration.
Warren must be aware that the president elect doesn't agree with him on all issues.
He must also be aware that the reason behind this generosity (aside from Obama's decent nature) is the desire to bring the country together, to heal the wounds of the culture war that has been raging during the past eight years.
So what does he do?
He quite intentionally fans the fires of that war, by loudly and publicly proclaiming his anti-gay positions.
I understand where he's coming from. He sees the world as a very binary proposition. Things are either just right or just wrong. He knows which is which, and is duty bound to tell those of us who don't. His worldview doesn't admit the possibility that he might be mistaken.
James Randi has recently posted about Rick Warren on a different issue—the miraculous intervention which Warren claims occurred within his family.
Warren's daughter-in-law was pregnant:
...the baby was in a breech situation, a critical position arranged by God; this was remedied by medical science during the Caesarian procedure, an invention by Man to thwart natural disasters brought about by a not-uncommon imperfection of the human body - which is also God's design. And the baby's umbilical cord had shut off oxygen-rich blood, another design error, or maybe a purposeful Act of God. The mother had a sizeable brain tumor, placed there by God, who we're told creates all these things.
And the Divine solution to this problem, according to Rick Warren? God - who, remember, is the Creator of Heaven and Earth, Omnipotent and Omniscient, knows all, the One who can do anything He wishes - arranged the oxygen-deprived baby in a breech position, bringing about a crisis that medical science had to avert by performing an operation. And He thereafter allowed medical science to detect the tumor, which is still in place, being poorly placed for access by surgery. [read the original post]
Randi is a bit extreme in his analysis, but the fact that Warren sees the situation as simply a benevolent intervention by God, while ignoring all of the various implications James Randi points out, says something about the nature of his rhetoric.
Unlike a great many other Christians, Warren's rhetoric is completely political. He knows the conclusion he is aiming at, and any contradictory evidence is ignored or explained away.
Something very like this is going on with his stance toward homosexuals. He argues that homosexual behavior is wrong—comparing it to incest and child abuse—and, until recently, his church website contained the following statement:
Because membership in a church is an outgrowth of accepting the Lordship and leadership of Jesus in one’s life, someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback Church.
His reason for not accepting gays into his church is that a "homosexual lifestyle" is in contradiction to the "Lordship and leadership of Jesus in one's life".
If we assume that the "Jesus" he is talking about is the Jesus in the gospels it's difficult to understand how he can make that statement, since that Jesus doesn't say a thing about gays, lesbians, or gay and lesbian marriage.
But I'm not so naive, having once been a fundamentalist myself. It's a mistake to take people who claim to take the Bible "literally" literally.
Warren doesn't have any direct evidence that Jesus would have disapproved of homosexuality. What he does have are a very few, rather weak, pieces of indirect evidence, which he combines with his own prejudices to come to the conclusion he wants to come to.
There are only a handful of verses in the entire New Testament which can be interpreted to speak to the topic of homosexuality, and of those only one which does so without question. None of these is spoken by Jesus.
The one unambiguous reference does not even call homosexuality a sin. At most, if you read the section in isolation from the overarching message of the book of Romans, it sees it as a sort of punishment. (The same passage endorses the death penalty for the sins of envy, gossip, and disloyalty to parents—if you take it literally.)
But I'm not writing this to argue his interpretation. I'm merely pointing out that his conclusion is based on very slight evidence, compared to some conclusions that he doesn't draw.
Let me call your attention to another verse.
This one is completely unambiguous. This one is repeated three times in the Gospels, and it's spoken in all three cases by Jesus himself:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Rick Warren has much more solid evidence, given his beliefs about the authority of scripture, to exclude unrepentant rich people from his church than he does to exclude gays.
If he were at all consistent, his website would contain a paragraph like the following:
Because membership in a church is an outgrowth of accepting the Lordship and leadership of Jesus in one’s life, someone unwilling to sell all they have and give it to the poor would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback Church.
Why doesn't it?
The answer is quite simple. Rick Warren is not adverse to money. In fact, he needs people who have excess money to contribute to his church.
On the other hand, he doesn't like the idea of homosexuality.
The reason that he can get an anti-gay message out of the Bible, but not an anti-wealth message, has to do with his basic approach to language and reasoning.
It's a form of political rhetoric. He knows what he wants to prove in advance, and he goes to the Bible to find the evidence to support that.
Barack Obama, of course, is dealing in a different kind of political rhetoric by inviting Rick Warren to pray at his inauguration.
That invitation is a rhetorical act, intended to send a message to the right wing of this country that Obama is serious about healing the very division that Rick Warren is trying to widen.
The problem is that, given Warren's current irresponsible behavior, the invitation—or its withdrawal—is likely to widen that division.
So what is Obama to do? He can leave the invitation open and alienate his own supporters, or he can withdraw it and alienate the other half of the country.
There is another alternative: he can have two prayers.
There are many pastors in the United States who have come out in favor of gay marriages, and many pastors who are even gay themselves.
Why not invite one to share the podium with Rick Warren?
