Posted on 03/12/2015 6:41:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Seven years after Jeremiah Wright came to national fame as President Obamas radical pastor, a man who declared God damn America from the pulpit, the presidents faith is still a matter of controversy. With a new presidential election looming, its apparently urgently important for members of the media to know whether Republicans such as Scott Walker believe that President Obama is a Christian.
Walkers answer I dont know is not one the media want to hear. But how can any man know another mans heart especially the heart of a person hes never met? Who but God knows our deepest beliefs? To the extent that a president bares his soul to anyone, it wont be to a reporter or to any person likely to speak to a reporter. Thus, any pundit or commentator who purports to declare what a president really believes on matters of faith should be viewed with deep suspicion.
But while we cant know the faith in a mans heart, we can discern quite a lot about the faith he manifests. Discussions about religion should center not just on orthodoxy (correct belief) but also on orthopraxy (correct conduct). And while we cant know a presidents inner walk of faith, we can know his conduct, and we can know how he publicly ties that conduct to his professed faith. In other words, we can discern how he practices his civil religion.
In the recent past, Bill Clintons public walk of faith was instantly recognizable to anyone who grew up in the heavily churched South: the backslidden Baptist, fluent in the language of faith, struggling with personal demons, yet instantly able to make connections with pastors and the public.
Evangelicals who met with him privately often came away impressed with his awareness of his own sin, with his professed desire to be a better man, and with his knowledge and awareness of Scripture. He spoke of a desire to protect life, and they believed him. He spoke of his close walk with God, and they believed him.
His policies, however, frustrated and angered many Evangelicals and Catholics. Yes, he said that he wanted abortion to be rare, but in practice his support for Roe v. Wade was unwavering. And there were lingering suspicions that he was conning the public, that perhaps he wasnt so much struggling with personal demons as he was regretting that he had gotten caught.
George W. Bush, by contrast, presented a form of mainstream Evangelicalism common to many of our nations so-called megachurches. Focused on a relationship with Jesus, heavy on stories of personal renewal and redemption (President Bush spoke of his past battles with alcohol), oriented toward reaching out to the poor (especially overseas), and plagued with an oddly unbiblical optimism about human nature, the mainstream Evangelical is hardly the religious scold portrayed in the secular media.
President Bushs policies including his greatest successes and most consequential mistakes reflected this public faith. For a success, think of the launch of the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the millions of lives it has saved.
For a mistake, think of the consistent failures to understand the cultural challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it turned out God may not have implanted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. Some human hearts burn with much greater desires for vengeance and blood.
What about President Obama? What is his public faith? Much ink has been spilled almost all of it wasted attempting to discern what President Obama really believes. Im a frequent guest on Christian radio shows, and even now more than six years into his presidency the occasional caller will proclaim, with confidence, that the president is actually Muslim.
When Jeremiah Wright exploded onto the scene in 2008, and sound bites of his anti-American rants filled the airwaves, millions of Americans familiarized themselves with the basics of black-liberation theology and wondered whether President Obama was truly that radical.
He sat listening to Wrights preaching for years. He named his second book after a phrase in one of Wrights sermons. By his own admission, it was in Wrights church that he came to faith. He claimed that he attended the church every week, 11 oclock service. How could he not have been heavily influenced?
In his public faith, he was. But not by black-liberation theology. Instead, he has publicly adopted the beliefs and practices of Wrights denomination, the United Church of Christ (UCC), perhaps the most liberal of the Mainline Protestant American denominations. In fact, when one considers not just the presidents public professions of faith but also his public policies, his relationship with the UCC represents the perfect marriage of church and politician.
Obamas public professions of faith have been in near-perfect harmony with his churchs teachings. The UCC, like many Mainline denominations, is scarcely Christian in any meaningful theological sense. Its roots lie in the Reformation, but its theology would be unrecognizable to any of the great reformers. Rather, it draws on selective Christian teachings and selective Christian traditions to provide general spiritual comfort and, specifically, to inspire its members to progressive social activism.
The UCCs statement of its own beliefs is remarkable for how little traditional, orthodox Christianity it contains. The church proudly declares, The UCC has no rigid formulation of doctrine or attachment to creeds or structures. Its overarching creed is love. The church emphasizes each persons spiritual journey, the power of peace, the power of possibility, and the belief that each person is unique and valuable. If youre looking for the Apostles Creed, or any expression of beliefs remotely similar to the Apostles Creed, youve come to the wrong place.
In 2004, Barack Obama gave perhaps his most candid interview about his personal beliefs, which clearly reflect UCC influence. Heres his basic expression of faith: So, Im rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.
Obama noted that Jesus was a wonderful teacher and said, Jesus is an historical figure for me, and hes also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.
In response to the question Do you believe in heaven? he responded dismissively: Do I believe in harps and clouds and wings? He went on to explain that he did, in fact, believe in some form of eternal reward: What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded.
Perhaps his most famous statement in the interview regarded sin, which he described as being out of alignment with my values.
To be sure, President Obama has said that Christ died for our sins, but viewed in context with his other theological statements, he is not speaking the language of most orthodox believers, of the necessity of substitutionary atonement to reconcile a soul with God, but rather in accord with a more progressive model. Journalist Lisa Miller in a 2008 profile of Obamas spiritual journey described the concept well: Christs gift of salvation was to the community of believers, not to individual people in isolation.
Obamas expressed beliefs do not, of course, represent traditional Christian orthodoxy, but they do represent a kind of Mainline orthodoxy, which holds that religions are roughly equivalent (so long as theyre not distorted into fundamentalism) and that Christs death didnt represent an atoning sacrifice so much as an example of his love and commitment to nonviolence.
We see this line of thinking not just in the UCC but in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, and many others. Writing in First Things, Philip Turner, former dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, described the Episcopal drift from orthodoxy, a drift common to all Mainline churches:
The Episcopal sermon, at its most fulsome, begins with a statement to the effect that the incarnation is to be understood as merely a manifestation of divine love. From this starting point, several conclusions are drawn. The first is that God is love pure and simple. Thus, one is to see in Christs death no judgment upon the human condition. Rather, one is to see an affirmation of creation and the persons we are. The life and death of Jesus reveal the fact that God accepts and affirms us.
The result of this theology is a transition of focus from a relationship with the divine to a relationship with man, and to advocacy of very specific social policies. Turner continues:
Accepting love requires a form of justice that is inclusive of all people, particularly those who in some way have been marginalized by oppressive social practice. The mission of the Church is, therefore, to see that those who have been rejected are included, for justice as inclusion defines public policy. The result is a practical equivalence between the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and a particular form of social justice.
And this brings us from a public-policy standpoint to the most ironic aspect of President Obamas declaration of faith, that he is a big believer in the separation of church and state and that hes very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.
President Obamas church, at its core, is thoroughly and officially invested in politics. This is, of course, an accusation hurled at Evangelical conservatives all the time, mainly in an effort to silence them, to drive them from the public square. But when it comes to denominations such as the UCC, it is formal, doctrinal truth.
In 2007, Senator Obama spoke to the UCCs Iowa conference, declaring, My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I wont be fulfilling Gods will unless I go out and do the Lords work. And what is the Lords work to the UCC? Politics.
The UCC has a Web page called Understanding the Issues that provides church resources on dozens of contentious public-policy issues, from major national and international issues such as Immigration, Israel/Palestine, Pentagon Spending (the church declares that the federal budget is a moral document), and LGBT Justice to more small-scale issues such as the UCC Coffee Project. In many cases, the policy positions are quite clear. The church calls on Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian territories, for example. In others, the church connects members to far-left social-justice resources.
Contrast this with the Web pages of major Evangelical denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the Presbyterian Church in America, which focus on mans relationship to God while providing minimal to nonexistent commentary on public policy. Public policy for these denominations is largely a matter of individual conscience, applying the principles of faith, rather than an instrument for enacting formal church policy. To be sure, Baptist and Presbyterian denominational leaders advance pro-life policies (so does the Catholic Church), but the full breadth of public-policy positions embraced by the UCC makes it a virtual ChurchPAC. Yet its the religious Right, not the religious Left, that is consistently accused of improperly mixing faith and politics.
There is remarkable conformity, in fact, between President Obamas words and policies and his churchs official positions on public policy a level of conformity that would cause alarms to ring across the progressive spectrum if there were similar Evangelical church statements to which a conservative president adhered. With the exceptions of his apparent (temporary) lie regarding his opposition to same-sex marriage (which his church has supported since at least 2005) and the churchs opposition to some of his military policies, the president has advanced UCC positions again and again.
But theres a chicken-and-egg problem here. Does President Obama hold these views because of church teaching, or did the church essentially spiritualize views he already held? Theres evidence of the latter. In his 2004 interview, discussing his conversion, Obama said that it helped connect the work I had been pursuing with my faith.
The picture thats painted is of a young man looking for a spiritual experience that would confirm and then deepen his values, not of a young man lost, recognizing his sinful nature (indeed, by contrast, Obama speaks eloquently of his pre-Christian good deeds) and embracing his Savior as the true and only hope in this life and the life to come.
And this brings us to the reason a man could, on the one hand, rebuke religious certainty expressing itself in politics while, on the other hand, essentially becoming an instrument of officially sanctioned church policy. The UCC and the rest of the Protestant Mainline offer little religion in the classical sense, but rather spiritualized politics supplemented with personal inspiration and self-created meaning inspiration and meaning that they believe can be gained from virtually any other major religion.
And because the focus isnt on God but on man, the practitioner is oblivious to the fact that hes embodying a union of church and state that would repulse him if practiced by the orthodox.
Barack Obama may believe in black-liberation theology, or he may not. He may have a close relationship with God, or he may not. We cant know his heart. But when it comes to his civic religion, President Obama is his churchs and liberal Christianitys great and mighty instrument.
David French is an attorney, a writer, and a veteran of the Iraq War. This article originally appeared in the March 23, 2015, issue of National Review.
Which is why the Bible tells us that we will know them by their deeds.
The Bible is the first to declare that "talk is cheap" that way..
Yes. And I am the Easter Bunny.
No, really, I am . . .
No...he is most assuredly not. Nor is he even prone to honorable feelings towards Christians or their faith. He is openly hostile by every measure and has demonstrated a propensity to attack that specific faith using governmental agencies to do so because it is our founding faith of our country and undergirds many of our American cultural norms and principles most of which he fully disagrees with.
Judge a man not by what he says but by what he does. He can say he’s a Christian but everything he does shows he’s muslim.
He told an Islamic dinner - "I am one of you."
He was on ABC News and referenced - "My Muslim faith."
He gave $100 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to re-build foreign mosques.
He wrote that in the event of a conflict -"I will stand with the Muslims."
He assured the Egyptian Foreign Minister that - "I am a Muslim."
He bowed in submission before the Saudi King.
He sat for 20 years in a Liberation Theology Church condemning Christianity and professing Marxism.
He exempted Muslims from penalties under Obamacare that the rest of us have to pay.
He purposefully omitted - "endowed by our Creator" - from his recitation of The Declaration Of Independence.
He mocked the Bible and Jesus Christ's Sermon On The Mount while repeatedly referring to the 'HOLY' Quran.
He traveled the Islamic world denigrating the United States Of America.
He instantly threw the support of his administration behind the building of the Ground Zero Victory mosque overlooking the hallowed crater of the World Trade Center.
He refused to attend the National Prayer Breakfast, but hastened to host an Islamic prayer breakfast at the WH.
He ordered both Georgetown Univ. and Notre Dame to shroud all vestiges of Jesus Christ BEFORE he would agree to go there to speak, but in contrast, he have NEVER requested that the mosques he visited adjust their decor.
He appointed anti-Christian fanatics to his Czar Corps.
He appointed rabid Islamists to Homeland Security.
He said that NASA's "foremost mission" was an outreach to Muslim communities.
As an Illinois Senator he was the ONLY individual who would speak in favor of infanticide.
He is the first President not to give a Christmas Greeting from the WH, and went so far as to hang photos of Chairman Mao on the WH tree.
He curtailed the military tribunals of all Islamic terrorists.
He refused to condemn the Ft. Hood killer as an Islamic terrorist.
He refused to speak-out concerning the horrific executions of women throughout the Muslim culture, but yet, has submitted Arizona to the UN for investigation of hypothetical human-rights abuses.
When queried in India he refused to acknowledge the true extent of radical global Jihadists, and instead profusely praised Islam in a country that is 82% Hindu and the victim of numerous Islamic terrorists assaults.
He funneled $900 Million in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Hamas.
He ordered the USPS to honor the MUSLIM holiday with a new commemorative stamp.
He directed our UK Embassy to conduct outreach to help "empower" the British Muslim community.
He embraced the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood in his quest to overthrow the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, who had worked with Israel to fight terror for decades..
He provided funding for mandatory Arabic language, Quaran, and culture studies in schools across our country.
He follows the Muslim custom of not wearing any form of jewelry during Ramadan. Again this year, he wore no wedding ring and no watch during Ramadan.
He departs for Hawaii over the Christmas season so as to avoid past criticism for NOT participating in seasonal WH religious events.
He was quick to support the Muslim Brotherhood to depose Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, formerly America's strongest ally in North Africa; but, remained muted in your non-response to the Brotherhood slaughter of Egyptian Christians by the Muslim Brotherhoods leader, Mohammed Morsi.
He quickly invited and then hosted with a heros welcome for terrorist Mohammed Morsi in the White House, after he overthrew Mubarek! The Muslim Brotherhood terror group is the parent of terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
He appointed and is never far from his chief adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Muslim, who is a co-organizer of the Muslim Sisterhood, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. She is Iranian and her parents still live in Iran.
Obama actions tell the truth about him.
Rhetorical question of the year?
Super Post. The best list supporting Obama’s Muslim leanings that I’ve seen.
If he was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then he could be considered a Christian; but from his actions he could be dead on the inside. Just as an Israelite during Christ time was circumcised, and yet not faithful, and therefore considered a brood of vipers or dead men, they were still Israelites; as this was the message Christ gave consistently to the Pharisees, etc.
If he was why did he change his name?.
How many times has he shown anger at Christian slaughter going on in Middle Eastern countries? I think it’s zero.
What religion is Valerie Jarret? Has anybody ever asked? An Iranian born...
He created a power vacuum in Iraq, now filled by ISIS and Iran.
How many times has he defended Islam? Many times, at the same time telling Christians to not get on a “high horse”.
During an interview with George Stephanopolous, he said he’d never been criticized for “his Muslim faith”, only to be corrected, “you mean your Christian faith?”. How many Christians would make that mistake?
While Senator, on taxpayers dime, he supported Raila Odingo for President in Kenya, a Muslim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6eVVVKFHu0
Odingo lost, then said the voting was rigged and urged violence...Muslilm mobs killed 1000 and burned 800 Churches, he was made Prime Minister to stop the violence.
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-s-radical-ties-raila-odinga
http://www.wnd.com/2008/10/78324/
I may not have the right to judge “how good a Christian?” somebody is, but I know a NON-Christian when I see one.
It’s almost as though he’s used his position to create chaos and specifically allow Christian persecution. If the only evidence of being a Christian is Jeremiah Wright....give me a break, Black Liberation Theology is just racist hate speech.
He’s not just a Muslim, he’s a communist Muslim.
Obama has said he was attracted to Christianity by tenets of Christian faith, such as how we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper.
For Obama to cite a completely mangled and misunderstood interpretation of a Bible story as his inspiration for Christianity, simply shows how little he understands about Christianity.
Dumb question!
“my Muslim faith” bump
This school registration reveals that Barack Obamas name is really Barry Soetoro, he is an Indonesian citizen and his faith is Islam ..
Was Obama Once an Indonesian Citizen? Heres What We Found When We Went There Looking
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/11/05/was-obama-once-an-indonesian-citizen-heres-what-we-found-when-we-went-there-looking/
The they there name when they become a more perfect Muslim. Cassius Clay - Mohammed Ali, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (born Chris Wayne Jackson, and I think Barry Soetoro Barack Obama. I think he and Velerie Jarrett are Si’ite Muslims because they support Iranian policies.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.