Jacques Berlinerblau, at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, wonders why secular press and opinion hasn't spoken out about Barack Obama's speech at the University of Brownsville last Friday. In the speech, which was at a gathering of evangelical and Catholic clergy, Obama talked about how "I was introduced to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed and that if I placed my trust in Christ, He could set me on the path to eternal life," and "whenever I hear stories about Americans who feel like no one’s looking out for them, like they’ve been left behind, I’m reminded that God has a plan for his people. . . . But it’s a plan He’s left to us to fulfill."
Berlinerblau contrasts the lack of outrage about Obama's remarks to the firestorm created when Mike Huckabee suggested we amend the Constitution to conform to God's standards. He writes:
These pious musings have not aroused as much as a peep of protest from nonbelievers and Church-State separatists . . . .
This absence of outrage goes a long way in demonstrating how thoroughly secularism in this country is entwined with, and supportive of, political liberalism. For years, the received (albeit flawed) wisdom held that a secularist was a liberal and vice versa. But as the 2008 campaign has shown, Democrats with presidential aspirations are strenuously trying to decouple that association . . . .
Obama's speech—it wasn't his best and much of it was rehashed—was filled with a variety of theological ideas (and ambiguities) that we will be discussing for months if he wins big tonight. One is that God has a plan—a plan that is apparently centered on America (but what about Canada?). Another is that the divine plan only comes to fruition if all citizens pitch in and do their part (but what about nonbelievers who won't get with the program?).
Should he seal the deal in Texas and Ohio, the one claim from this speech that we will be scrutinizing most concerns his insistence that “our values should be expressed not just through our families, our communities, and our churches, but through our government.” That's the new Faith-and-Values friendly liberalism of the 2008 Democratic Party in 2008. And that's something that may make it hard for secularists to live their lives in peace.
Will we scrutinize it? Surely it is incumbent on us to do so, but right now the Democratic Party's new attempt to be "faith-friendly" is pretty much given a free ride, as in "isn't it nice that they're not being so hostile to religion anymore?" That assumes, of course, that they were hostile to religion to begin with, a myth that often comes as part of the packaging of the new faith message, a sort of repentance for . . . something that never happened. In any case, if we're going to question the Republican pandering to their religious base, we can't just assume that the Democratic pandering to their religious base is pure, devoid of hypocrisy, or in line with the constitution.
--Sarah Posner
