Obama, McCain and Warren

I was just able to watch the forum on faith and politics at Saddleback this morning (I had to record it as I was away Saturday evening). The thing that struck me the most was how focused on politics and how little faith played a role in the discussion. A much better example of how something like this should have been conducted would be to revisit the discussion at Messiah College earlier this year during the Democratic Primary. Anyway, here are a few thoughts I had.

Let me start with Obama. I resonate with a lot of what Obama says because you can tell he struggles through it - he thinks about things in a methodical way (this came across in the first question he answered, where he said that he would have to have multiple influencing him on multiple fronts in different areas of his administration). He also is very gracious, as was seen when he described the time he worked across party lines with John McCain on Campaign Finance Reform (something that earned neither any friends in Congress) and when he praised President Bush's AIDS initiatives in Africa. I also liked the fact that Obama kept coming back to the idea that faith was about helping the "least of these" - he quoted the verse in Matthew.

Now, I think Obama failed when it came to the problem of abortion. And, the main reason was that he would not say whether or not a human life begins at conception. This is much a bigger question than can be answered in the two minutes he's given, but he didn't come close. And, as a person of faith, this is semi-troublesome to me. What gives me hope on his view of abortion is that he wants to eliminate the reasons for people having abortions, like poverty and no health insurance. He also talked about how hard it is for the woman to make this choice - a choice that cannot be easy at all on her. I find that semi-redeeming.

Next, let's talk about McCain. I really find McCain difficult at many times and my main difficulty with his complete inability in this election to step out on his own, or to think for himself. When watching this, we got "Sunday School" (or, better, Republican Sunday School) answers from him. Which is fine, if that is what he thinks (I have good friends who are conservatives that I find to make compelling and sound arguments for their position). The thing about McCain, though, is that it didn't show any struggle or depth to his thinking or his life. I think it also showed how out-of-touch McCain is. An example: he talked about giving every working, American family a tax cut of $5000 to buy any health insurance they would like. When living in Chicago, my wife left a job where we had health insurance and took a job where we did not, which meant we had to get health insurance (she was pregnant at the time). So, we got health insurance to cover us which cost us over $6000 a year. When my son came, that price jumped to $8000 (luckily we were able to pull through by cutting a few corners, mainly not having to fuel a car). The point being that the McCain tax cut would not have paid for our health insurance.

Also, on the McCain end, I thought that he really overplayed the "war card." Nearly every answer he gave came back to his views on war or his experience in Vietnam (something he has continually said that he wants to leave out of the race). As a question, during a question on evil, he lauched into a discussion on how we must destroy Al-Qaeda. It just seemed that for McCain, war was the only issue he was comfortable talking about or reviewing and he consistently came back to this point (as a person in academia, I see this a lot as people are so specialized that they can only talk about or discuss one thing - a person I know always brings the discussion to Barth and Bonhoeffer because this is what he has read and knows).

Between the two candidates, I think that McCain probably "won" the debate (although, I'm not sure how you "win" something like this). And, the reason he won is he said the "right" things as he did not stray from party lines and he also did not say anything to upset the people in the room (which meant they cheered for him). Obama, on the other hand, said some stuff that would have been harder to handle in the room (like saying that a household making $250,000 would be rich - he's talking to suburbanites living in Silicon Valley). Also, his stance on abortion would have been quite unfavorable to many in the audience.

Now, though, onto Pastor Warren. I must say, I have been a critique of his for awhile. However, I had started to think that he was doing better with much of his ongoing work in Rwanda (which I do and continue to applaud - he didn't need to do that to solidify himself in evangelicalism). But, last night showed that the critiques were levelled rightly. The questions did not have anything to do with faith and politics, but only with politics. There was one or two questions about faith and only one explicitly mentioning Jesus. He also limited the discussion to issues that were "evangelical strongholds" like abortion and gay marriage - in these, evangelicals generally agree. However, he did not bring up, or even broach, the morality of taking care of the poor and oppressed, he did not talk about the morality of war, he did not talk about the commandment of God to be stewars of the earth and what this means in relation to climate change, or the fact that as professing Christians, both of these men hold to a higher power than the United States of America and are ultimately citizens of something more. Rather, he kept it tried and true to the old evangelical standard of making it easy on the Republican, asking questions that don't require too much stray from the conservative agenda. And, in that, Rick Warren misrepresented the diversity in evangelicalism and failed to address the questions that would really transform our world.