The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:
The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…
The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…
But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”
I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.
P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).
AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?
Holy cow, folks, I just scanned the comments to which Ted refers. That’s not the Crooked Timber conversation we know and love. For the record, I do not know Michael Moore’s address or telephone number, don’t need to know it, and will not call Focus on the Family. If you allow the trolls to energize you too much, it’s just awfully easy to begin behaving like one.
I will not be scanning the comments on that thread, but I wish to say that I think it would be terrible for an attack on FOTF to turn into an attack on Christianity. [For the record, I am not and have never been a Christian.]
After all, FOTF’s beef with Moore has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity or the Family. Opposing Bush’s foreign policy is not in any way an anti-Christian or anti-family viewpoint—in fact, the issues seem completely orthogonal to Christianity and the family.
Just a heads up…looks like someone posted Moore’s home address in your previous thread about the topic. It’s currently the most recent post.
As for the sad little boy, you mean ‘biological parent and potentially adoptive parent,’ don’t you?
Geez I really don’t feel like taking offense today of all days but your comment, John, is extremely offensive.
“How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?”
That ad is so irrelevant it’s…mind-boggling. In fact it seems to be based on the premise I had as a child about how reproduction happens: via marriage. I mean physically, not socially - I thought marriage was what made women pregnant. That ad seems to think the same thing. Er - hello? Gay people can have children with or without marriage, and they can have marriage with or without children.
But of course, I’m forgetting, it’s not about logical connections. Winsome kid=do whatever the ad tells you to do.
As an aside, I would note that the addresses of a great many private citizens are legally available via Federal Election Laws and regulations. Individuals contributing $200 and above must provide addresses when they contribute and they can be accessed through such sites as Opensecrets.org
Now I imagine that there are some children who are literally conceived as children of gay and lesbian partnerships, and perhaps there will be more such children once gay marriage is legal (though I kinda doubt it—if heterosexual marriage were banned, would that have stopped you from having kids with the person who is now your spouse?).
Then maybe it’s not the case that a gay-marriage ban would have left little Timmy the same, except that his parents could not marry. The ban would have kept little Timmy from being born in the first place. There is a debate about whether you can harm someone by creating them, but I think it’s a stretch to say that someone who is born into a gay/lesbian marriage is so bad off he should never have been born.
Well, I wouldn’t want to make little Timmy cry. Every Child Needs a Mother and Father, so I hereby propose a new law: Any child whose parents are divorced should be put out of his misery, posthaste. Look how sad Timmy looks….
I think I’d be more impressed by Land’s stand if giving the RNC their mailing lists wouldn’t make it far easier for the RNC to connect with their members without going through the Southern Baptist Convention.
The only influence, I’m convinced, that the conservative Christian denominations have over the Republican party is that they deliver votes. If the Republican party can get to their congregants directly, why should they need to go hat in hand to the leadership of those bodies?
I think this is Land resisting a power grab, not standing up for the separation of church and politics. He’s a wardheeler, and Bush/Cheney just made a grab for his files.
“Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome.”
Yeah, German Protestants practiced a similar principle in the early 1930s and look where it got them. While Catholic leaders went political and warned that no Catholic should vote for Hitler, Protestant leaders ‘felt moved’ not to take a stand.
The voting data speaks for itself. In many Catholic farming communities no one voted Nazi. In otherwise identical Protestant farming communities some 70% of the population voted Nazi—one of the highest percentages in all Germany and a critical factor in Hitler’s rise to power. (See Who Voted for Hitler?)
The difference then and now? In 1932 Hitler only talked vaguely about getting nasty with the Jews. Kerry, on the other hand, has no problem with aborting over a million babies a year. That means that voting for Kerry in 2004 is worse than voting for Hitler in 1932.
This incident illustrates evangelicalism two basic flaws. One was aptly summed up in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.” It’s a religion of sentiments and not ideas. Believers feel rather than think.
The other is that it fails to see the close link between faith and courage. Evangelicals live almost exclusively in the Pauline epistles, which were written in an era when the church was so tiny, it did not dare raise its voice. They avoid the Old Testament prophets, who thunder against evil whatever its source.
And they avoid looking at the Jesus of the gospels, who clearly did not believe that niceness was the supreme virtue. It’s quite easy to imagine the Jesus of the gospels charging into the Democratic convention in Boston, whip in hand, overturning tables and blasting their beliefs.
As someone who was raised a Southern Baptist in the last days of segregation, I find this particular cowardance especially disgusting. Then the church should have bluntly told its members, “Do not vote for anyone who defends segregation.” Instead, it was limply nonpartisan, cowering behind the church/state wall.
As with abortion, that simple principle would have meant not voting for the Democratic party, including in the Presidental races of the 1950s. In 1952 and 1956, the Democratic party was very careful put southern segregationists in the VP slot to assure the South that it would do nothing.
That, incidently, is why black people don’t trust white evangelicals. They know that when tough times comes, evangelical preachers will wimp out and refuse to take a stand. Sadly, today some of the people who talk most about Jesus resemble Him the least.
—Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Mike Perry,
You really should put down the crack pipe. It’s not helping you.
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