Category Archives: Faith and politics

Barack Obama runs from his record

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It appears that Gianna Jessen’s ad has really rattled the Obama campaign.

They’ve now come up with an ad in response (one which tries to blame John McCain for running the original ad, even though it was produced by a different organization):

There’s just one problem with the Obama campaign’s ad: his record. Here’s what he had to say on the subject when he wasn’t running for office (scroll down to p. 87):

[I]f we’re placing a burden on the doctor that says you have to keep alive a previable child as long as possible and give them as much medical attention as—as is necessary to try to keep that child alive, then we’re probably crossing the line in terms of unconstitutionality.

Personally, I agree with Yuval Levin on this one:

So a child who has been born and is living and breathing outside the womb can’t get medical care because by some legal definition he or she is “pre-viable”? That doesn’t sound like always supporting medical care to protect infants.

And here’s audio of another statement by Sen. Obama on the issue:

The truth here is that

Barack Obama defended infanticide in the Illinois statehouse. He voted against protecting children who survive abortions—viable children were left to die in a Illinois hospital and he would not take legislative action to make that a clear criminal act.

In other words: Sen. Obama, Gianna Jessen isn’t lying—you are. Which is odd, because doesn’t the Left always tell us that pro-lifers are “extremists” who are “out of touch” and “out of the mainstream”? If that’s so, why wouldn’t you stand by your vote and your record, instead of running from it?

Moral psychology and voting right (or left)

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Dr. Johnathan Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has written an absolutely fascinating article titled “What Makes People Vote Republican?” This isn’t another piece of boilerplate liberal condescension after the manner of Thomas Frank, or another disciple of George Lakoff peddling the idea that if Democrats just wrap liberal ideas in conservative language, people will all vote the way they ought to (i.e., for the Democrat). Rather, it’s a careful analysis using the language and tools of what Dr. Haidt calls “moral psychology” which aims to rebuke and replace those models:

Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

The model Dr. Haidt works with here is complex, though not complicated, but I think this paragraph summarizes the results of his research clearly enough:

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at http://www.yourmorals.org/.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

This produces a result with which many conservatives are familiar: as Dr. Haidt told the New York Times‘ Judith Warner,

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.

I’d always attributed that to the effects of the liberal echo chamber that is the MSM; it’s interesting to think that there’s something deeper and more significant to it. It’s also interesting, and encouraging and heartening as well, that Dr. Heidt offers hope and a possible way forward to address the problem he’s identified. It’s a remarkable article, and perhaps one which could have as great an effect as the work of Frank and Lakoff—only in, I think, a much more productive direction for our country. My thanks to Mark Hemingway and John Derbyshire for calling attention to it.

Setting the record straight

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There have been a lot of folks on the Left beating up on evangelicals for, well, not beating up on Sarah Palin. “She’s a working mom, her oldest daughter is pregnant before marriage, she . . . she . . . what do you mean, you don’t want to tar and feather her?! You hypocrites!” Such folks would do well to read the thoughtful reflections of Dr. Alan Jacobs and the Anchoress on this issue. (And if that doesn’t work, they can try Thomas Lifson.)And speaking of Alan Jacobs, I could wish more people on both sides of the political fence understood this:

It’s actually possible to have some sympathy for a political candidate—to think that a candidate is being treated unfairly—whom you have no plan to vote for. It is not the case that all compassion is partisan.

Memo to the movement: be careful

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As thrilled as I was to see Gov. Sarah Palin capture the hearts of (most of) the Republican Party, there are a couple ironies here of which we need to be wary: concerns that we ourselves have raised about Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are in danger of becoming true of us as well. The lesser is the one that I’ve seen noted, that after invoking celebrity culture to critique Sen. Obama and Obamamania, the McCain campaign has most certainly, if not fully intentionally, created a celebrity of its own, and Palinmania is very real. We need to be careful not to get too caught up in it.

More serious, though, is the messianic aura and language of the Obama campaign, something for which the McCain campaign also jabbed him in its ad “The One.” I wrote about this a couple months ago thusly:

I don’t usually link to the same blog back-to-back, but there’s another post of Doug Hagler’s I want to point you to, one he titled “Idolatry American style: Barak Obama”; obviously we have very different views of the Republican Party (though even most Republican voters aren’t very happy with the Republican Party at the moment), but as I’ve written before, I think the idolatrous tendencies in American politics are a real problem, and I agree with Doug (and others) that they’re particularly pronounced around Sen. Obama. (I don’t think they’re the senator’s fault—rest assured, I’m not accusing him of having any sort of delusions in that regard—but I do think he’s yielded to the temptation to take advantage of them, and I really wish he hadn’t.)

Somehow or other, we need a countercampaign to bring the people of this country around to a critically important truth: Politics will not save us. We keep getting sucked in to the idea that if we can just win this vote or elect this candidate, that will take care of our problems, and it just isn’t going to happen; Doug’s dead on when he writes, “Nothing messianic is coming from either party any time soon.” Nor any time later, either. Politics will not save us, government will not save us, no institution is going to save us; only God can save us, and he builds his people from the bottom up, one life at a time. If we want to work to address our problems in a way that will actually make a difference, it certainly helps to have a government (and other institutions likewise) that facilitates our efforts rather than making matters worse, but in the end, all we can do is follow God’s example. One life at a time, one family at a time, one small group of people at a time. From the bottom up. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The danger of all the excitement over Gov. Palin, glad though I am to see it, is that we could all too easily lose sight of this; we could all too easily turn her into our own secular messiah, with “salvation” defined as a McCain victory in November. For this, too, we must remember that politics will not save us, and government will not save us—a McCain government no less, and no more, than an Obama government. Vote for McCain/Palin, yes, work for them, yes, as I am able; but remembering always that that is, at best, the lesser hope. Remember always that they too are only human, and flawed.

Update: for another, and quite interesting, perspective on this, check out this post from ShrinkWrapped. HT: The Anchoress)

Talking sense

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I haven’t given a nod to Tyler Dawn in a while, which is remiss of me, because she puts up some really good stuff on her blog, Following Him Alone. I appreciated her thoughtful comment on the furor over Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, which captures some things I was thinking and feeling, but better than I’d been able to do; and even more, I appreciated her post “Rebuke without Relationship,” which captures something important that had never consciously occurred to me, but which makes intuitive sense. I commend them both to you.

Barack Obama should be proud of himself

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Well, the despicable innuendos that Bristol Palin, Gov. Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, is the real mother of four-month-old Trig Palin have been abruptly decapitated by brute fact: Bristol Palin is in fact five months pregnant. The McCain campaign knew about it and decided to make the matter public in order to silence the baseless rumors.As a pastor, I’ve married a fair number of couples; I’ve only had one who were still virgins when they said “I do.” I wish that wasn’t the reality in our society, but it is—as, I suspect, it has been in most societies, though the sex-drenched nature of ours makes it harder. I believe premarital sex is a sin and an unhelpful behavior, but I also know full well that we are all sinners, and many of us guilty of far worse. In my own ministry, I choose to address that particular sin by moving couples toward marriage and toward spiritual and relational maturity, including a deeper understanding of the meaning of sex and its place in their relationship. If a couple is willing to accept that responsibility, and its consequences, and make the commitment to building a strong marriage, that’s all I ask of them. I could wish that Ms. Palin had not had sex with her boyfriend, as I could wish for many girls around this country; the fact that she had the courage and grace to commit to her unborn child and to that child’s father is admirable, especially in the face of the public scrutiny that that would entail. (To accept the even greater scrutiny that was bound to come with the VP nomination, when she was surely given a veto by her mother, is admirable as well.) To do as she did—yes, she fell short of what she had been taught, as we all do; and then as Christ calls us to do, she got up and, together with her family, responded to it as redemptively as possible. To have done otherwise would have been a far greater sin than any she has in fact committed.All this is a very common drama in homes around this country. We as Christians try to raise our children to do what is best, and I hope none of my daughters will ever find themselves in this position; but they’re sinners just as we’re sinners. Given the power of sexual attraction and the drive of our hormones, we may do our best to teach and encourage them to save sex for marriage, but even with the best of intentions, they may not. If they get pregnant before marriage, we won’t love them any less, though it will be less than what we hope for them; we will stand by them and give them the support and care they need to go forward from that point as God would have them live. I think it’s a sad commentary on this day and age that such a story could produce a headline like “Assessing the Political Impact of Bristol Palin’s Pregnancy”; that such a thing should have a political impact just seems wrong.This is where I give major, major kudos to Barack Obama. I’ve written about him sharply at points, in large part because of my disappointment—I had hoped for a great deal from him, perhaps more than was really realistic of anyone, and especially of someone in politics; but there are moments when I can still see clearly the reasons for my initial hopes. This is one of them.

Barack Obama addressed a gaggle of reporters this afternoon to discuss the latest goings-on with Hurricane Gustav. After brief opening comments on the much-hyped, overly politicized hurricane, reporters were curious about one thing: 17-year-old Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, made public today.“I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics,” the Democrat said forcefully. “It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he continued.The candidate who himself was born to a teenage mom, reminded reporters, “You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.”

Straight on, square up, dead on point, and absolutely right. Sen. Obama truly should feel proud, because he’s struck a blow for the good here, and not least for decency and fairness in our politics; I think there are a lot of folks in this country who don’t understand that this kind of thing is off limits, and that unfortunately places like Democratic Underground and Daily Kos are among them, but the more people listen to him here, the better off we are. (And if anyone could get people to listen on this point, it’s probably him.)Incidentally, I’m also in complete agreement with Sen. Obama on this:

When asked about an “unnamed McCain advisor” accusing the Obama campaign of spreading despicable rumors surrounding Bristol Palin online, Obama interrupted the reporter mid-question. “I am offended by that statement. There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us,” he said directly. “Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired,” he added.

Based on the way Sen. Obama has run his campaign so far, there’s no plausible reason to doubt his statement. And if there was in fact someone on the McCain campaign staff accusing his campaign of doing this—well, let’s just say that John McCain has fired people for less already this political season, and in that case, he should put boot to butt personally.HT: JustJuls

Stem cells: the heart of the matter

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There’s a fair bit to be said about embryonic stem-cell research, which I’m surprised to realize I haven’t written about here hardly at all; there’s the fact that research involving adult stem cells is far more promising and far more productive right now (due to the teratoma problem with embryonic stem cells), the fact that we can now produce embryonic stem cells without creating embryos, and the ways in which the pro-abortion movement is clearly using ESCR as a stalking-horse against the pro-life movement. I haven’t written about any of that, but I think I’ll probably do so at some point in the fairly near future, because it’s an important issue—perhaps the most important moral issue of our time.For the moment, however, I’ll just point you to Tyler Dawn’s recent post on the subject, which approaches it from a different angle, and a far more personal one—and in so doing, puts her finger right on the most important point. Thanks, Tyler Dawn.

Barack Obama, 9/19/01

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Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.(From the Hyde Park Herald, September 19, 2001; quoted in “Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama,” in The New Yorker.)

I agree that we need to “understand the sources of such madness”—but to do that, we need to understand them on their own terms, not to try to reduce them to contemporary Western touchy-feely-ism. The problem with the 9/11 terrorists wasn’t psychological. I certainly agree that they showed “a fundamental absence of empathy,” but that was the symptom, not the condition—it was the effect, not the cause. Specifically, the absence of empathy and the plot to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and (I believe) the U. S. Capitol were both effects of a common cause: the murderous ideology of jihadism, the Islamic heresy propounded by Osama bin Laden. The problem isn’t “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”; that’s certainly a problem for its own sake and something to be addressed as best as we’re able, but it’s not the root cause here. The 9/11 terrorists, after all, hadn’t come from “poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”—they were middle-class and well-educated. The problem is a worldview that says that blowing people up because they aren’t Muslims (and the right kind of Muslims, at that) is a good and noble thing to do. There, Sen. Obama, is the source of the madness—there and nowhere else.HT: Carlos Echevarria

Democrats for faith-based initiatives?

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I’ve said before that one of the things I appreciate about Barack Obama is his commitment, as a liberal Democrat and a Christian, to making the case to his fellow Democrats for allowing and heeding religious voices and arguments in the public square; it was thus no surprise, but nevertheless a good moment, to see him make the case for continuing and expanding the current administration’s support for religious social-service organizations. What I didn’t expect was to see the Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, the General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America (my home denomination), weigh in with the comment that in doing so, Sen. Obama is only rebalancing the issue and reclaiming a prior Democratic position:

In September 2000 I was at a breakfast for religious leaders at the White House when President Clinton said that regardless of who was elected that fall (Bush vs. Gore), faith-based initiatives would be one of the new challenges to be worked on by any president. And the best speech on the subject was given by Al Gore during that campaign. So this never was seen as a “Republican” idea until Bush was elected, and then many more Democrats began to distance themselves from the initiative. . . .The pundits have it wrong. This isn’t a right-wing or a left-wing idea; it isn’t a Republican or a Democratic idea. It’s simply a good idea.

I have a great deal of respect for Wes, and I certainly agree that this shouldn’t be “a right-wing or a left-wing idea”; equally, I hope his optimism that this can be an issue on which the parties can make common cause proves out. However, I think he’s forgetting something: there are a lot of Democrats who don’t agree with him, who think this is a “right-wing idea,” want no part of it, and want no part of Sen. Obama speaking out for it. I agree that the marginalization of the Christian Left, to the point where folks like Jim Wallis are basically rubber stamps for the secular Left, is a bad thing; I’m not, however, optimistic that it can be reversed as easily as all that. I applaud Sen. Obama’s commitment to continuing and expanding the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives—but if he’s elected, I’ll be very much surprised if that’s a commitment on which his party permits him to follow through.HT: Presbyweb

Another false messiah

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I don’t usually link to the same blog back-to-back, but there’s another post of Doug Hagler’s I want to point you to, one he titled “Idolatry American style: Barak Obama”; obviously we have very different views of the Republican Party (though even most Republican voters aren’t very happy with the Republican Party at the moment), but as I’ve written before, I think the idolatrous tendencies in American politics are a real problem, and I agree with Doug (and others) that they’re particularly pronounced around Sen. Obama. (I don’t think they’re the senator’s fault—rest assured, I’m not accusing him of having any sort of delusions in that regard—but I do think he’s yielded to the temptation to take advantage of them, and I really wish he hadn’t.)

Somehow or other, we need a countercampaign to bring the people of this country around to a critically important truth: Politics will not save us. We keep getting sucked in to the idea that if we can just win this vote or elect this candidate, that will take care of our problems, and it just isn’t going to happen; Doug’s dead on when he writes, “Nothing messianic is coming from either party any time soon.” Nor any time later, either. Politics will not save us, government will not save us, no institution is going to save us; only God can save us, and he builds his people from the bottom up, one life at a time. If we want to work to address our problems in a way that will actually make a difference, it certainly helps to have a government (and other institutions likewise) that facilitates our efforts rather than making matters worse, but in the end, all we can do is follow God’s example. One life at a time, one family at a time, one small group of people at a time. From the bottom up. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.