I think Senator Obama should take that as a tremendous complement.
Focus on the Family continues its critique of whether Barack Obama is Christianish enough, based on a speech in 2006.
One of the attacks — paralleled by James Dobson the other day, has to do with the old question of whether we are a “Christian nation.”
Barack Obama [on on video]: Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
Trobee: Is that true?
Minnery: No, it’s not true. It’s not even close. Senator, we are not an atheist nation. Senator, we are not a Hindu nation. We are not a Buddhist nation. 76% of the people, according to last year’s Pew Center on Religion survey, people identify themselves as Christian. Now, all of them are not practicing, yet 40% still go to church once a week and, by and large, it’s Christian denominations they’re going to. We are, alone among the world, a nation still with a strong Judeo-Christian heritage and he is trying to erase that. And he does so at his own peril.
Um … listen (and read) Obama’s words. He didn’t say we are not a Christian nation. He said that we are not just a Christian nation — by which he means that we are not a nation solely of Christians, but one that encompasses — as a quarter of the population, at least — other religious and philosophical beliefs.
And, as Obama went on to point out, that 76% figure from the Pew research study is itself misleading: 26% are evangelical Protestants; 18% are mainline Protestants; 24% are Catholic; 7% are “Historically Black” traditions. And within each of those are dozens of denominations, and churches within those denominations, and individuals within those churches. Lumping them together as a single “heritage” is dicey (esp. given the internal conflicts they’ve had); speaking for them as a single voice is historically and theologically idiotic.
At the same time — and perhaps in recognition of that — that same Pew survey found that 70% of Americans “believed that many religions can lead to eternal life and that there is more than one true interpretation of the teachings of their own religion.” That includes 60% of Southern Baptists.
In other words, the American people as a whole seem to agree that more than just one group deserves to be heard in this country, and that nobody has a monopoly on truth and salvation.
Sen. Obama is not trying to erase any “strong Judeo-Christian heritage” of the United States. He’s noting, correctly, that we have many other heritages we can draw on also, and many voices we can and should listen to today. And that to deny that, to ignore the increasing diversity of beliefs in this country, and to play sectarian games of trying to make this solely an “us vs. them” Christian nation is not only false, it’s dangerous.
Actually, the bit that the right is jumping on is that on the Video he does not say what the speech text says, and since they can edit the sound bite just like they want, it proves the point they are trying to make.
Text from the Vid:
There is enough of a pause that they cut it off before he says “at least not just”. This was what last nights drive home was all about on the radio, and this was the way it was edited.
Cool. Not only are they wrong, but they’re intellectually dishonest, too. Case closed.
Ummm…yeah, and your point is? 🙂
It’s pretty much what the past 7 years has all been about…right? It’s what the GOP is all about, and if it works why change?
I mean it’s not as if the Media, other than say The Daily Show or Countdown is going to point this out, and when all the cable news channels are going to say what Drudge, Limbaugh, Dobson and the Mighty GOP Wurlitzer tells them to say.
The GOP can lie, cheat (on their many wives, multiple times) and steal, and the press will happily go to the GOP barbeques and willingly catapult any propaganda that the GOP wants out there.
There are two different sets of rules out there, one for the Dems and one for the GOP, and the sooner the Dems figure that out the better.
Re: “‘… we’re no longer just a Christian nation; …’”
I wonder when does Obama believe you ever were “just a Christian nation” and when does Obama believe you stopped being “just a Christian nation”.
The “…government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”, according to Article 11 of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796, and passed by the United States Congress.
Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S.A. Constitution states: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land…”.
The Tripoli treaty passage is kind of weak (it’s more a reassurance than an agreement, and not the gist of what the treaty was about), but as a *government* it’s true that the US was *not* founded as a Christian nation, in the sense that European countries had established churches, etc. (I’d point to the language of the Constitution, the 1st Amendment, and the forbidding of religious tests for office as much better proof of that.)
That said, the US in its early years, perhaps for most of its history until the last half-century, has been *culturally* a Christian nation, insofar as the vast majority of folks professed to be Christians of one sort or another, minority religions faced degrees of legal social discrimination (no Jews at the country club, for example).
Certainly the growth in the population, esp. in particular urban areas, of non-Christian populations (other faiths, or no faith at all), now evidently, by self-identification, a quarter of the population, and the increasing cultural familiarity of people with elements of non-Christian faiths, makes it clear that we are no longer “just” a Christian nation, politically or socially.