I'm both amused and appalled at the pearl-clutching being done by the "Obama is an Atheist Muslim Satanist" crowd over his comments at the National Prayer Breakfast late last week. Among his comments:
"Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."
A good sampling of them can be found here (http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/02/06/conservative-media-bash-obama-for-mentioning-cr/202447), but the ones that stood out to me most were from Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia and faithful Republican: "The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime. He has offended every believing Christian in the United States."
Speak for yourself, Jim. I'm much less offended by Obama's remarks than by the ahistoricity of the people denying the way Christianity has been used and abused as a justification for things that would have Jesus in tears — and still is, today. That's not an attack on Christ, or on Christianity, but on those Christians who project their own tribalism and prejudices onto the Bible and, hey presto, derive justifications for them.
(I'm also offended, yet amused, by the folk who are so appalled that Obama would lambaste Christianity at a National Prayer Breakfast, with the subtext that, no matter how much they pretend otherwise, it really is intended as a pro-Christianity rally.)
Obama's remarks can be found, in full, here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/05/remarks-president-national-prayer-breakfast. It seems to me that anyone who would take those comments, deeply steeped in faith, and make them out as some sort of crypto-Muslim secularlist attack on Christianity is reading from their own script, not in pursuit of the truth.
(Some more good commentary, on the question of humility and doubt that Obama raised, here: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_02/obamas_fear_of_god_again_anger054048.php)
The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech
Using religion to brutalize other people is not a Muslim invention, nor is it foreign to the American experience.
Since the last election, I really like how Obama is finally speaking out. The haters gotta hate, and will no matter what he says
Or, as Jesus himself is said to have put it:
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
— Matthew 7:3-5
+Paula Jones Obama definitely seems to have become more openly challenging of the rhetoric thrown his way since the election (though this particular speech is much in keeping with stuff he's previously said).
I wasn’t offended, but then, being an Episcopalian, I’m not the Right Kind of Christian. You know who offends me?
The Lord’s Resistance Army (Joseph Kony)
The KKK
The Orange Volunteers
The Aryan Nations
The Christian Identity Movement
I’m sure there are many more, but those are the ones I thought of immediately. Oh, and people who insist on rewriting history to suit their own agendas, and that would be…Jim Gilmore.
Amen, Ellie.