Bloggers Rush In

Owing to the slow pace of hometown reporting on the controversy, it remains unclear whether Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren snubbed Barack Obama and Mitt Romney or they snubbed him.

So speculation abounds. Naomi Schaefer Riley thinks the president's miffed at Warren, who's being, well, pastoral and giving Obama some cover:

One...suspects that Mr. Obama's refusal to participate has much to do with Mr. Warren himself, who publicly opposed the [free birth control] mandate. In February the pastor tweeted: "I'm not a Catholic, but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure."

So why is Mr. Warren covering for the president by suggesting that nixing the forum was Mr. Warren's idea?

Andrew Sullivan comes right out and calls Warren a liar for saying the cancellation was his idea and speculates about why Romney would never have risked sitting down with the world's most famous Christan evangelical:

[T]he idea that Mitt Romney would ever have agreed to sit down for fifty minutes to discuss the fact that he believes God was once a human being, that humans can become gods as well, that Israelite tribes once inhabited the Americas and that polygamy exists in the after-life ... well, it was never going to happen, was it?

The Full Story Hasn't Quite Registered

The Orange County Register hasn't caught up with what others are reporting about Saddleback Church's decision to cancel its presidential forum. Pastor Rick Warren strongly implied to the Register that he'd withdrawn his invitations to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney because of their campaigns' incivility. But CNN's reporting suggests that neither candidate was ever planned to attend. As of this evening, the Register article, not updated since this morning, says it hadn't reached the campaigns. Maybe tomorrow's edition will have a followup story.

Warren announced in July that the forum would take place this week. When CNN contacted Saddleback Church today to get a comment about the candidates' evident disinterest in journeying to Lake Forest, Warren's spokeperson referred them to the Register article, which is evidently serving as a reliable expression of Warren's point of view, if not necessarily the full story.

We Can't Have Politicians Being Hypocrites!

Because he is offended by their rocking, socking campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren says he has withdrawn his invitation to the presidential candidates to participate in a forum at Saddleback Church:

It would be hypocritical to pretend civility for one evening only to have the name-calling return the next day.

Saddleback To Back

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are coming to our neighborhood in August.

The Peace Of Christ That All Understanding Passes

Mega megachurch angst reported today in Orange County. The Schuller family hopes to take part of the Crystal Cathedral congregation to a new church, while Saddleback Church is in the midst of a controversy sparked by this article in the Feb. 26 Orange County Register:

Abraham Meulenberg, a Saddleback pastor in charge of interfaith outreach, and Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at a mosque in Los Angeles, introduced King's Way as "a path to end the 1,400 years of misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians."

The men presented a document they co-authored outlining points of agreement between Islam and Christianity. The document affirms that Christians and Muslims believe in "one God" and share two central commandments: "love of God" and "love of neighbor." The document also commits both faiths to three goals: Making friends with one another, building peace and working on shared social service projects. The document quotes side-by-side verses from the Bible and the Koran to illustrate its claims.

"We agreed we wouldn't try to evangelize each other," said Turk. "We'd witness to each other but it would be out of 'Love Thy Neighbor,' not focused on conversion."

The Register follows up today:

An outreach effort to Muslims initiated by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest has sparked a national uproar among evangelical Christians, with some accusing the Rev. Rick Warren, Saddleback's pastor, of betraying core Christian principles and Warren responding that his beliefs and intentions have been misrepresented.

Since an Orange County Register article published Feb. 26 detailed the outreach effort, evangelicals across the country have taken to blogs, social media and Christian news outlets to debate whether and how Christians should forge relationships with people of other faiths.

Longtime critics of Warren have published lengthy online accusations that the influential pastor, who delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, has gone too far in seeking theological common ground with Muslims.

Warren's critics accuse him of sending cunning coded messages to Muslims in his inaugural prayer and of being more interested in feeding people, preventing HIV-AIDS infections, and promoting justice than bringing souls to Christ. It's an age-old, tiresome attack on faithful Christians who happen to be called to make life better for all those whom God loves.

Warren does dispute the assertion in the original Register article that he believed Christians and Muslims worshiped the same God. “We worship Jesus as God. Muslims don't,” he writes. “Our God is Jesus, not Allah." This is also a wearisome debate. If we insist, as Warren's critics do, that Muslims worship a different God, aren't we making the fantastic claim that there are more than one? It's a commonplace of interfaith dialogue that the Abrahamic faiths share historical and theological antecedents, especially the monotheistic God of Abraham, Issac, and Ishmael. Islam's critics are really saying that Muslims worship God the wrong way. Whenever tempted to think that may be true, I remind myself that I'd take a different view if I'd been born in Jordan to Muslim parents rather than in Detroit to a mother who happened to write the newsletter for the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. I proclaim Christ crucified and risen, but humbly enough, I hope, to allow for the diversity of God's infinite mind.

I like Gen. 1's Version Better, Anyway

As Rick Warren, Saddleback's energetic pastor, adds the the cause of America's alarming biblical illiteracy to his portfolio, Paul Wallace wonders if influential Christian leaders are contributing to a rise in scientific illiteracy:

I suspect more moderate leaders like Warren have a lot to do with it. Warren’s own views on evolution, while less hysterically expressed than those of [Albert] Mohler and [Ken] Ham, are not finally distinguishable from them. In a 2007 Newsweek debate with Sam Harris, Warren declared, “Do I believe in evolution[?] The answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man... Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it's fine with me.”

In his opinion on evolution, Warren displays his own considerable scientific illiteracy. That in itself is not too big a deal; one man rejecting evolution is not news. But when that man is Rick Warren, a major Christian figure who has, despite his conservative credentials, pushed the evangelical envelope on a number of environmental and social issues, the rejection carries a lot of freight.

Nixon, Conservatives, And The Cultural Wars

In 2008's Nixonland, Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon helped ignite today's culture wars with his law-and-order, southern-strategy, damn-the-radicals campaign in 1968. As I blogged at the time, Perlstein's sprawling, colorful narrative didn't close the deal for someone who believes that conservative culture warriors were the chief beneficiaries of Nixon's demise. In fact, as I wrote on the Nixon foundation website in 2002, it was the best thing that ever happened to Ronald Reagan:

While the fringes of American politics might not have the sheer numbers, they have massive influence. In a political firefight, embattled centrists can be weakened and even done in by flanking fire.

It happened to Richard Nixon during 1973-74. The left had always hated him for his crusading anti-communism. Their antagonism was magnified by his Vietnam policies, which many so-called neoconservatives, ironically, vastly underrate to this day. But we sometimes forget that many on the right also disliked his domestic and economic policies as well as his rapprochements with China and the Soviet Union.

During Watergate, no one was surprised when leftist antiwar firebrands such as Robert Drinan and Bella Abzug demanded his resignation. But the political earth moved when they were joined in March 1974 by conservative GOP Sen. James Buckley. Buckley warned that if RN didn’t resign, Republicans would be wiped out in that November’s mid-term elections.

After learning in August 1974 that conservative lions such as Barry Goldwater had also abandoned him, President Nixon gave up the fight, even though he hadn’t yet been impeached. Republican House and Senate candidates took a massive hit in November. Indeed the party did so badly that it’s reasonable to speculate it would’ve fared better in 1974 if the President had stayed in office until the House could impeach and the Senate try him.

Perhaps remembering what had happened to Republicans that dark November, during 1998-99 most leftist Democrats, many of whom despised President Clinton, stuck by him through his impeachment crisis. Suffering no left-wing defection comparable to Buckley’s and Goldwater’s was the key to his political survival.

The dynamic was subtly different during and after Watergate. For many conservatives, after the Goldwater debacle in 1964 the issue wasn’t so much whether the GOP would dominate politics but who would dominate the GOP. Perhaps some conservatives anticipated that MR (moderate Republicanism) would be discredited along with RN.

I doubt many Republicans intentionally moderated their support for President Nixon to help pave the way for President Reagan. But their profound antipathy to many of his policies might have kept some from fighting as hard as they would have for someone they considered a true-believing conservative.

Whatever conservatives’ calculations at the time, Watergate and its aftermath unquestionably revived the prospects of the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the party.

An analysis in the New York Times by Sam Tanenhaus (biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr.), makes clear that the right's distrust of Nixon (which had some sinister aspects as well) was actually, pace Perlstein, the genesis of today's culture wars. Tanenhaus argues that the same dynamic, but with an essential theological coloration, is now dogging Barack Obama. Here's an extended excerpt, but please read the whole thing:

To an early supporter like the writer Andrew Sullivan, Mr. Obama’s religious journey offered possible deliverance from decades of ideological strife. “He was brought up in a nonreligious home and converted to Christianity as an adult,” Mr. Sullivan observed in a celebrated essay in the December 2007 issue of The Atlantic. “But — critically — he is not born-again. His faith, at once real and measured, hot and cool — lives at the center of the American religious experience.”

In retrospect the idea seems not only mistaken, but perhaps misbegotten, for it was premised on a misreading of America’s ideological warfare, in particular the influence of evangelical religion on the tenor of American politics....

Conservatives disenchanted with the moderate presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford threatened to bolt the Republican Party, prefiguring the Tea Partiers of today.

[Conservative publisher Bill] Rusher, for one, urged restive conservatives to form a third party, the Independence Party, that would form a “great coalition” composed of “the great bulk of middle-class Protestants.” Its natural tribune, Mr. Rusher wrote, was Ronald Reagan, who would in fact go on to challenge Mr. Ford in 1976 — a campaign that had the crusading atmosphere of a third-party insurgency.

All this signaled that political protest had migrated from the fringes to the mainstream, where it remains today. Seen from this perspective, Mr. Obama, who fits the 1960s idea of a consensus politician, appears to be firmly planted in one camp, with his establishment pedigree and his urban sensibility. He has overt connections to the underclass, through his work as a community organizer, and to the overprivileged, through his Ivy League background, but little to the alienated middle class. To this group he seems not so much the outsider of his actual biography but, rather, a burnished product of “the new elite” or “the new class,” to quote terms that came into vogue in the 1970s.

Mr. Obama’s Christianity also puts him in a particular camp. He is the Christian who seems as deeply immersed in the Social Gospel as in the Gospels, who acknowledges “I didn’t have an epiphany,” and describes his faith as “both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey.”

It’s not that Mr. Beck and his followers don’t recognize Mr. Obama. They do, or think they do, all too well.

Tanenhaus's analysis rings instantly true to the practicing pastor. Rusher's crusading early-1970s Protestantism has long since burst most denominational constraints. As an Episcopalian in Orange County, California, I do ministry along the edges of the chasm that's opened between mainstream Protestantism (what Obama has been practicing as a member of the United Church of Christ) and neo-evangelicalism. Rick Warren and Saddleback Church (a Southern Baptist church that tries hard to look fashionably post-denominational) are just two miles up the freeway from St. John's, after all.

Besides that, ask any Roman Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, or indeed UCC congregant how often she's disclosed the name of her denomination only to have a suburban neighbor or coworker reply, "I go to a Christian church." What are we, chopped liver? Just about. Ask the teachers at a Corona, California evangelical school about it. They were fired this summer because their baptisms weren't legitimate -- the school's way of saying they weren't really Christians.

That's just what some are saying about Obama, isn't it? Not a real Christian. As good as a Muslim.

Three cheers for Sam Tanenhaus for nailing this.

Keep Your Sacred Cows Off My Grass

Opponents of the lower Manhattan mosque such as atheist (if I may) Charles Krauthammer say it's not a matter of using government power to stop it but just making clear that having an Islamic installation so close to the World Trade Center is aesthetically offensive. Sure, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has the right to build wherever he wants. But you have to wonder about the motives and basic human decency of anyone who would insist on doing something that's so disruptive to tender local sensibilities.

For his part, atheist (while I'm at it) Christopher Hitchens would like to question Rauf about his support for Iran's theocracy and his dubious theories about U.S. foreign policy and the Sept. 11 attacks. I can certainly understand that. As I've argued in this space, I'd like to ask the imam about women's rights myself -- not as an excuse for denying him permission to build his community center and mosque, you understand. But such questions would be a legitimate part of the vetting process, would they not?

Of course if the Roman Catholic Church wanted to build a new parish in an upscale neighborhood in Manhattan or San Francisco where Democrats had a 30% edge in voter registration, there might well be some pro-choice activists with questions of their own. It's not that anyone would want to take away the church's First Amendment rights. But you'd have to wonder about the capacity for empathy and basic good taste of those who want to deprive women of control over their own bodies trying to get a foothold in a neighborhood where their views would be considered noxious and even dangerous.

Now that I think about it, the hyper-Orthodox rabbi at my local Chabad Center probably has some extreme views about Arabs and their genetic links to the Amalek raiders as described in the book of Genesis. If he and his congregation want to expand their facility by building a preschool, that's all well and good. But local Arab-American groups might first want to ask, perhaps during a public hearing, about the curriculum -- though not to limit anyone's religious rights, no sirree Bob!

If I were a Latino and the LDS wanted to put a stake on my street, I'd definitely have a question or two about Mormon missionaries who dupe mis hermanos into converting by claiming that we're all descended -- get this! -- from a lost tribe of Israelites who came to North America 2600 years ago, which Mormons claim as a special revelation and anthropologists say is total bunk. I'm all for freedom of religion, but that doesn't meant I have to put up with Glenn Beck and his ilk foisting that kind of harmful racial mythology on my kids.

If I'm against gay marriage, and I think gay sex is a sin that disqualifies someone from ordained ministry, don't you dare try to put an Episcopal parish on my street. People are free to worship as they choose, but that doesn't mean you can come into my neighborhood and trumpet your radical political agenda from the pulpit.

If I'm for gay marriage, and it's legal in my state, I guarantee I'll bring a civil rights suit against any pastor who refuses to perform same-gender marriages because he insists on hewing to his narrow Bible-thumping theology. While I'm at it, I'll get a group together and picket his church -- not to deny anybody his right to worship whatever God he wants. I totally believe in freedom of religion. But I'm talking about my civil rights here, and having a bigot in my town is aesthetically offensive.

By the same token, if I believe that the protection of women's hard-won equality in the U.S. is a cultural imperative, I'm not sure the First Baptist Church of Lake Forest Saddleback Church should continue to operate with impunity, and with tax-exempt status to boot, until Rick Warren answers some questions about his denomination's refusal to allow women into the pulpit. Marginalizing any protected group in that manner is completely un-American. No one has the right to use the First Amendment as a shield for unpatriotic behavior.

What may make these hypothetical examples seem a bit far-fetched is that they're about what some mosque critics would call established American faiths -- even though Islam predates Protestantism by almost 900 years and Mormonism by 1200. Muslims comprise a fifth of the world's population. Perhaps five million live in the U.S.

Newt Gingrich may think he can help pick up a few House and Senate seats and boost his presidential chances by comparing them all to Nazis. But should he and the rest of the GOP succeed in driving Imam Rauf out of town, you just watch. The precedent will be used in unanticipated ways against other faiths and denominations that become nationally or locally non-PC -- maybe even yours. That's how politics works, as Gingrich learned after destroying Speaker Jim Wright only to be destroyed in return. Chevy Chase said it well: The Hindus speak of karma (though that doesn't mean I have to put up with their smelly sacred cows).

Warren Piece In The Church

Pastor Rick Warren is expected to speak at a June 23 meeting of "the Anglican Church in North America."

Tell Laura They Love Her (After All)

Surveying the right's underwhelming reaction to the legalization of gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont, Frank Rich at the New York Times detects a sea change:

On the right, the restrained response was striking. Fox barely mentioned the subject; its rising-star demagogue, Glenn Beck, while still dismissing same-sex marriage, went so far as to “celebrate what happened in Vermont” because “instead of the courts making a decision, the people did.” Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the self-help media star once notorious for portraying homosexuality as “a biological error” and a gateway to pedophilia, told CNN’s Larry King that she now views committed gay relationships as “a beautiful thing and a healthy thing.” In The New York Post, the invariably witty and invariably conservative writer Kyle Smith demolished a Maggie Gallagher screed published in National Review and wondered whether her errant arguments against gay equality were “something else in disguise.”

More startling still was the abrupt about-face of the Rev. Rick Warren, the hugely popular megachurch leader whose endorsement last year of Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, had roiled his appearance at the Obama inaugural. Warren also dropped in on Larry King to declare that he had “never” been and “never will be” an “anti-gay-marriage activist.” This was an unmistakable slap at the National Organization for Marriage, which lavished far more money on Proposition 8 than even James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.

The Preacher Clarifies Himself

Explaining why illness and exhaustion prevented Pastor Rick Warren from taping an interview to be broadcast Easter Sunday on ABC's "This Week," a Saddleback spokesman clarifies Warren's recent comments about gay marriage and Prop. 8:

Throughout his pastoral ministry spanning nearly 30 years, Pastor Warren has remained committed to the biblical definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, for life — a position held by most fellow Evangelical pastors. He has further stressed that for 5,000 years, EVERY culture and EVERY religion has maintained this worldview.

When Pastor Warren told Larry King that he never campaigned for California's Proposition 8, he was referring to not participating in the official two-year organized advocacy effort specific to the ballot initiative in that state, based on his focus and leadership on other compassion issues. Because he's a pastor, not an activist, in response to inquiries from church members, he issued an email and video message to his congregation days before the election confirming where he and Saddleback Church stood on this issue.

During the King interview, Pastor Warren also referenced a letter of apology that he sent to gay leaders whom he knew personally. However, that mea culpa was not with respect to his statements or position on Proposition 8 nor the biblical worldview on marriage. Rather, he apologized for his comments in an earlier Beliefnet interview expressing his concern about expanding or redefining the definition of marriage beyond a husband-wife relationship, during which he unintentionally and regrettably gave the impression that consensual adult same sex relationships were equivalent to incest or pedophilia.”

Now Pastor Rick's In The Middle

Sandy Rios compares Rick Warren's denial of his pro-Prop. 8 advocacy to Peter's denial of Christ. She accuses him of currying favor with cultural elites.

He Was For It Before He Was Against It

Pastor Rick Warren told Larry King that he hadn't endorsed Prop. 8 and that his only comment was in an e-mail to church members. But he had endorsed it and made a video. He makes a point to say he wasn't an anti-Prop. 8 organizer, as if the most famous pastor in the world has to sponsor house meetings and run the photocopier all night in order to have an impact on a political outcome.

Contradictory statements by a widely respected religious figure are dispiriting. Be for it or against it, brother, but please don't say you didn't when you did.

Worry Or Trust?

In the early church, after Holy Eucharist (or Communion), worshipers would share the leftovers with those who were hungry in their communities. This weekend at Saddleback Church, Pastor Rick Warren distributed 10,000 grocery bags to his congregation with instructions to bring them back full so the church could increase its support for local food banks. Says Warren in the Orange County Register:

The No. 1 way that God tests your faith? Money. God wants to know: Are you going to worry, or are you going to trust me? … When I meet others' needs, God takes care of mine.

Thinking Carefully About Prayer

Pastor Mark Roberts offers a detailed analysis of the inaugural prayers of Rick Warren and Gene Robinson.

Koo-koo-ka-choo, Bishop Robinson

The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson and his daughter, Ella, with the President

With the Christian church in disunion for the last, oh, roughly 2,000 years, interesting that a politician is acting a unifier. Gail Russell Chaddock:

"Rick Warren and Gene Robinson are symbols and represent large constituencies – and were in that sense daring choices," says Charles Haynes, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington. "But I think the mood of the country is to say: This is what we want. People want to see the president trying to represent the country as a whole. If there ever was a moment when we have to have a cease-fire in the cultural wars, it's now. Given the nature of the problem the country faces, we cannot afford to demonize each other, to tear each other down."

Hat tip to Greg Larkin

Make That 40 Peaceful Transitions

Adam McCoy is a politically savvy monk, former prior of the Mt. Calvary monastery in Santa Barbara -- until it burned in November, one of four houses operated by the Episcopal Order of the Holy Cross. He was also my spiritual director several years ago before becoming rector of a church in Manhattan. Br. Adam on the inauguration:

Rick Warren’s prayer...made the appallingly ignorant point that “Now today we rejoice not only in America's peaceful transfer of power for the 44th time.” I have so far found no one in the media who pointed out that four of those transfers were at the point of a bullet: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy. So many brains were checked at the door, Warren’s and those of the people whose job it is to frame these events for the nation. The adulation of Obama worries me.

Inaugural Pastors

Bishop Gene Robinson on his Sunday prayer and Pastor Rick Warren.

Lake Forest Rules! Plus He Wore A Tie

Pastor Rick prayed an eloquent prayer, especially the "forgive us" litany and the acknowledgment that God loves all his people. He enunciated well saying Malia and Sasha.

People will inevitably debate his decision to end with the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus taught to his disciples and apostles. I prayed it with him. But many could not. Warren didn't mean to offend non-Christians. As a Southern Baptist, he meant to evangelize them. But in this sacred moment of national unity, to which he was called for civic and not religious purposes, a pastor essentially excluded millions of Americans.

The President-elect, his eyes closed, did not move his lips during the Lord's Prayer.

Rick Warren's Fangs

While Gustavo Arellano is proud that Orange County is on the cutting edge of American Christianity, he has some advice (and a prayer) for Pastor Rick Warren:

Saddleback Church belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention, about as socially conservative a denomination as one can find. When Warren endorsed Proposition 8 last year, and seemingly endorsed bombing Iran when he told Sean Hannity that it was fine to punish "evildoers," he shed his sheep's clothing and bared the conservative fangs long associated with Orange County, much to the detriment of his ecumenical standing.

If Warren truly wants to become "America's pastor," he'll scale back on such bombastic rhetoric. Warren has the chance to redeem Orange County as a place not of avarice but of altruism, and to show that evangelical Christianity can come free of politicking and show genuine concern for all. I'm praying for you, Rick, to consider my words and help lead us to a better future, damn the differences.