Christianists For Obama!

A rave review from the religious right:

Besides Obama, how many times have you seen a presidential candidate get up in front of a large crowd and talk in depth about his salvation? I’ll give you the answer: Zero. For Obama to stand up and talk about how Jesus changed his life, my friends that takes guts. You may disagree with everything he’s about, you may disagree with his policy goals but as Christians, shouldn’t we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life? ...

Barack Obama seems to want to bring the country together as best he can on this issue of faith and politics. His heart appears as though it's in the right place. To “call out” leaders of the Christian Right like that seemed a little too broad for my taste. (watch those comments here )He blanketed a lot of people with one broad brush. If you really look closely at those leaders of the Christian Right, it doesn’t seem fair to pigeonhole all of them in the same category and to say all they care about are abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design. These leaders have spoken out and taken action on issues like the genocide in Darfur, poverty in America, torture techniques, helping people after devastating natural disasters, etc. Do they focus on abortion and gay marriage more than progressives? Yes but is that such a crime to believe that God would be against it?

To me though, the criticism of the religious right was a small part of the speech. I saw it more as an uplifting speech that can bring people of faith together. For example, Obama talked about how God SHOULD NOT be removed from the public square.

Yes, Obama is aggressively staking his candidacy in part on an explicitly religious appeal. In this, he is Bush's natural successor, and threatens to make secular politics even more elusive in a fundamentalist age. He also threatens, if he pulls it off, to be a transformational candidate, turning American politics into a battleground primarily between those who believe the Gospels mandate an expansive welfare state and those who believe they mandate government's moral regulation of human birth, death and sex. For my part, I believe Jesus had no politics, let alone the big government politics of our time. And the attempt of both right and left to coopt his truth corrupts faith and politics simultaneously.