Conservatives got a new target today in their continuing game of whack the black man in the White House. At the National Prayer Breakfast the president had the gall to speak a few truths about the need for a less self-righteous and triumphalistic, more humble and ecumenical Christianity. They are especially worked up since they seem to believe that it behooves us to fight Islamic terrorism by demonstrating the truth of one of the main recruiting spiels used by hardcore jihadis - that Christians are out to get Muslims just because they're Muslims and Muslims are by definition bad. It was from this perspective that one of the attendees condemned the President's remarks as "“an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison. What we need more is a 'moral framework from the administration and a clear strategy for defeating ISIS.'"
Specifically, the president referenced such Christianity-sanctioned atrocities as the Crusades and Christian apologias for slavery and Jim Crow. Uncomfortable truths, but truths nevertheless. Had he wished to bring the lesson into the present day, the president could easily have added the use of religious belief to justify overt discrimination against LGBT people, but the examples he used were adequate to make his point:
Obama’s remarks spoke to his unsparing, sometimes controversial, view of the United States — where triumphalism is often overshadowed by a harsh assessment of where Americans must try harder to live up to their own self-image. Only by admitting these shortcomings, he has argued, can we fix problems and move beyond them.
I'm sure the President intended his comments for those serious Christians who maintain an open mind rather than those rigid souls for whom Christiantity is the basis for self- and cultural-justification (or political panderers to such individuals). Sadly, though, the public displays of outrage from the latter were all too predictable:
"The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R). “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”
The absolutism of such pronouncements along with the implicit demand for special deference that it embodies are almost breath-taking. As Ed Kilgore
points out in
The Wasington Monthly, this narrow, anti-ecumenical approach was vigorously articulated by
RedState's Erick Erikson who burbled over with self-righteous, biblical condemnation:
Despite the interpretations and defenses of the President on what he meant, he gave away the game with a bit of the speech not given nearly as much play in the media. From the transcript:
“I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.”
Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6) Christ himself is truth. When we possess Christ, we possess truth. The President is a moral relativist. It was clear in his whole speech. He cannot condemn and attack ISIS as he should because in his mind what is truth? Truth is a nebulous concept with our post-modern President. With truth a nebulous concept, right and wrong are too….
So I wish the President would stop professing himself to be a Christian if he is not going to proclaim Christ as truth and the only way to salvation. The “all paths” nonsense and moral equivalence might fit in with the present age, but the present age does not really fit with Christ.
While I'm actually pretty sure that the president didn't say anything that denigrated the role of Christ in individual salvation, but only observed that the spirit of Christliness covers a little more ground than the small space occupied by hard-professing Southern evangical fundamentalists, the type of self-searching and moral humility that he references is something that Pope Francis has also adressed. As Eamon Duffy notes in an article in Febuary 19 issue of
The New York Review of Books (behind a pay screen):
... . In a series of interviews and speeches, Francis has deplored clergy who “play Tarzan”—church leaders too confident of their own importance, moral strength, or superior insight. The best religious leaders in his view are those who leave “room for doubt.” The bad leader is “excessively normative because of his self-assurance.” The priest who “nullifies the decision-making” of his people is not a good priest, “he is a good dictator.” Bergoglio has even said that the very fact that someone thinks he has all the answers “is proof that God is not with him.” Those who look always “for disciplinarian solutions,…long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists” have “a static and inward-directed view of things,” and have turned faith into ideology. And so the experience of failure, of reaching one’s own limits, is the truest and best school of leadership. He has declared himself drawn to “the theology of failure” and a style of authority that has learned through failure to consult others, and to “travel in patience.”
Now there are, of course, within the Catholic hierarchy many who also
deplore the less authoritarian and more flexibile approach of Pope Francis, but most of us would agree that the President is in good company when he echoes Francis' admonition that the sincerely religious engage in self-questioning and accept the the importance of intellectuall humility. Alternatively, it seems clear that a Pope who
states that the Church is a Mother who "doesn’t see humanity as a house of glass to judge or categorize people" might not be too comfortable with the religious hubris of those like Governor Gilmore who consider an admonition to humility and tolerance as anti-American, or like Erik Erikson, unChristian.
And if you're worried that the Catholic Pope can't speak to evangelical protestants, Ed Kilgore takes the President into even more elevated company:
I also hate to break it to ol’ Erick, but there’s pretty ample scriptural support for the idea that Jesus Christ was a bit of a “moral relativist” himself—you know, the beam and the mote , “Judge Not That Ye Be Not Judged,” “the Sabbath is for man,” the woman by the well, the good Samaritan, the Two Great Commandments, etc. etc.