A Moral Imperative?
Vol: 95 Issue: 22 Saturday, August 22, 2009
“Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, from such turn away.” (2nd Timothy 3:5)
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” – Barack Hussein Obama, April 7, 2008, explaining rednecks to the Marin County (California) elite.
President Obama evidently believes he’s figured out the secret to winning over the rednecks in Flyover Country to his health care plan. Rednecks believe in God. Heck, they cling to Him, as Obama knows well. So why not enlist Him as a salesman?
To that end, The One held a conference call with interfaith leaders from around the country. “Interfaith” means Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindi, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.
When one is a liberal, one faith is as good as another because one god is as good as another. If you don’t believe God is real, then it doesn’t much matter how you address Him.
The one thing you all share is a moral conviction, Obama said. I know there has been a lot of misinformation in this debate and there are some folks out there who, frankly, are bearing false witness.
“The one thing YOU all share” . . . I believe that was what they call a ‘Freudian slip.” Obama didn’t instinctively say “we” all share because his instinct is to see religion in terms of “us” and “them”. To Obama, “us” means the godless liberal elite and “them” are the rednecks in Flyover Country that Obama was describing in Marin County.
Obama doesn’t see himself as a great moral reformer. He casts himself in the tradition of FDR and JFK. In his conference call, he invoked both former presidents without ever mentioning either the Name of God or the Name of Jesus.
Obama’s call kicked off a “40 Days For Healthcare Reform” campaign that boasts the support of “more than 30 religious faiths and organizations.”
Obama suffers from the same myopia that afflicts most non-Christians who think that all Christians are both simple-minded and easily led. Like most non-Christians, Obama thinks that being a Christian means checking one’s brains at the door.
Sadly, when it comes to the mainstream denominational Christianity represented during his conference call, he has every reason to believe he has them pegged correctly.
This isn t about ideology or partisan politics, said Dr. Joel Hunter, senior pastor at the 10,000-member Northland Church in Northland, Fla. This is about people s lives, people who lack health insurance or are afraid of losing what they have It is about who we are as a nation.
Pastor Jennifer Thomas of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Kansas City said that 400 Lutheran leaders from Missouri and Kansas have backed health care reform.
The Rev. Adam Hamilton of Church of the Resurrection in Leawood said his congregation will hold a health care forum Tuesday with representatives from the insurance industry, the medical community and others.
My hope is our people will come away not with the answer, but with a better understanding why health care reform is needed, he said.
So much for separation of church and state.
Assessment:
So which is it? Is God unconstitutional or not? It appears that God does a lot more campaigning for the Democrats than He does for the Republicans. Democrats invoke God freely in their campaigns without media backlash. Republicans who invoke God do so at their peril.
I covered the 1992 presidential election for “This Week in Bible Prophecy”. When Bill Clinton rewrote Scripture during his 1992 campaign, all I noted was that he rewrote Scripture. The fact that the media never called him on it I chalked up to the average liberal’s unfamiliarity with the Bible.
In that speech, Clinton misquoted 1 Corinthians 2:9, saying, “The Scriptures say, eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things that WE CAN BUILD.”
The actual Scripture says something entirely different: “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things WHICH GOD HATH PREPARED FOR THEM THAT LOVE HIM.”
As you can see, Clinton took a Scripture that glorified God and twisted it to glorify human accomplishment, which offended me mightily. I waxed eloquent about the details, but I missed the forest for the trees.
At the same convention, Al Gore quoted a verse that, to this day, I’ve never been able to find in any Bible version. On that too, I waxed eloquent, arguing that men who twist the Word of God to get elected would show no more respect for their own word than they did for His. Again, I missed the forest for the trees.
Dan Quayle also misquoted Scripture in his GOP convention speech, although in Quayle’s case, he simply hadn’t done his homework — his misquote made it sound more like God was in the Clinton camp.
The mainstream press, not surprisingly, caught that one, and I joined the rest of America in laughing — we’d all gotten used to laughing at Quayle after four years of ‘potatoe’ jokes. It wasn’t until much later that I came to realize that only the Democrats are allowed to employ God as a campaign worker.
During Election 2000, Professor of Political Science Paul Kendor noted in a NYTimes column that that God must be a Democrat:
“George W. Bush was pilloried for having the audacity to cite Jesus as his favorite philosopher in Iowa in December 1999, nary a reporter raised an eyebrow when presidential candidate Dick Gephardt said the following to Democratic voters in Iowa in December 2003:
He [Jesus] was a Democrat, I think. Needless to say, Maureen Dowd did not accuse Gephardt, unlike she did with Bush, of playing the Jesus card.
Kendor also noted that the GOP had learned its lesson by the 2004 campaign when the strongest religious message at the GOP national convention in 2004 came not from a Republican, but from Democrat Zell Miller.
“Because the Bush team has learned a crucial lesson: The press does not express outrage when Democratic politicians, unlike Republican politicians, talk about God.”
Kengor was himself evidently outraged by what he called the ‘most underreported story of the ’04 GOP Convention.
“Bill Clinton addressed the Riverside Church in New York during its Sunday worship service at the beginning of the GOP’s Convention Week. There, he accused Republicans of bearing ‘false witness’ and being ‘the people of the Nine Commandments’.
Gee. That’s what Barack Obama accused Obamacare opponents of doing during his conference call — ‘bearing false witness.’
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
In America, churches and ministers can lose their 501c(3) tax status for openly endorsing one candidate over another during a campaign season. The Supreme Court has long ruled that to be a violation of the so-called ‘Separation Clause’ between Church and State.
It is an axiom of the liberal left that it is the Republicans who cynically use God for political purposes. Actually, most Republican politicians recognize what a political minefield that can be.
Since most genuine Christians tend to focus on how someone walks the walk after they’ve heard him talk the talk, they tend to hold their guy to so high a standard that he is doomed to disappoint them eventually. Better to employ the politics of low expectations.
On the other hand, few Christians believe a Democrat who claims God anyway, so such claims fade into the white noise of politics. He can say what he wants about God and nobody cares.
Noted Kendor in his column about God and the Clinton administration; “I researched the Presidential Documents the official collection of every public presidential statement. An examination of the mentions of Jesus Christ by George W. Bush and Bill Clinton showed that through 2003, Bush cited Jesus, or Jesus Christ, or Christ in 14 separate statements, compared to 41 by Clinton during his eight years in office. On average, Clinton mentioned Christ in 5.1 statements per year, which exceeded Bush s 4.7.”
Other interesting facts and figures uncovered by Professor Kendor: During years in office, Bush spoke in churches three times. By contrast, Clinton spoke in churches 21 times, mostly during election years.
Kengor’s research provided the following examples of Clinton’s employment of God as a campaign worker:
By the grace of God and your help, last year I was elected President. Clinton, Church of God in Christ, Memphis, Tennessee, November 1993.
Our ministry is to do the work of God here on Earth. Clinton to a church in Temple Hills, Maryland, August 1994.
God s work must be our own. And there are many questions before us now in this last presidential election of the 20th century. Clinton to a church in Newark, New Jersey, October 1996.
The Scripture says, While we have time, let us do good unto all men. And a week from Tuesday, it will be time for us to vote. Clinton, Alfred Street Baptist Church, Alexandria, VA, October 29, 2000.
But I am pleading with you . I have done everything I know to do . [But] you have to show. So talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, talk to your family members, talk to your co-workers, and make sure nobody takes a pass on November 7th. Clinton, Shiloh Baptist Church, Washington, DC, October 29, 2000.
All this from the most morally bankrupt president in living memory, and possibly in US history, and nary a critical word from the mainstream press. Clinton was held to no standard whatever by the press when his private actions denied his public religious profession.
Consider all this and pull it together with me. The Democrats can invoke God without fear of backlash because nobody really believes they believe in Him. So when the Democrats dust off their Bibles once in a while, they do so to rave reviews because everybody wants to think God is on their side.
When the Republicans invoke God, the liberals suspect they really believe in Him. So their spirituality becomes a genuine barometer of their sincerity, and therefore subject to attack.
And not only by Democrats holding them up for ridicule, but also by Christians to whom their spirituality really IS a genuine barometer of their sincerity.
The cynical invocation of God as a political spokesman is the hallmark of spiritual bankruptcy. Obama’s god probably IS a Democrat. In 2nd Corinthians 4:4 the Apostle Paul identified him as “the god of this world.”
In 2nd Timothy 3:5 Paul warned, “from such, turn away.”
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