Via Michelle Goldberg and the Episcopal Diocese of Washington comes some not very flattering insights into Rick Warren's much-vaunted international work.
Goldberg, author of the essential book on the Christian right, Kingdom Coming, has a new book coming out this spring about the impact of religious fundamentalism on reproductive freedom worldwide. On Religion Dispatches, she reveals some of the impact of Warren himself from her reporting in Uganda:
Yet this is symbolism with real-world consequences and concrete implications. First of all, it reifies the image that Warren has been assiduously constructing for himself as “America's Pastor,” a post-partisan and benevolent figure with a quasi-official role atop the nation's civic life. When it comes to his public persona, Warren is something of a magician. He has convinced much of the media and many influential Democrats that he represents a new, more centrist breed of evangelical with a broader agenda than the old religious right. This is, in many ways, deceptive. Yes, Warren has done a lot of work on AIDS in Africa, but he supports the same types of destructive, abstinence-only policies as the Bush administration. One of his protegés, Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, has been a major force in moving that country away from its lifesaving safer-sex programs. He’s been known to burn condoms at Makerere University, the prestigious school in Uganda’s capital, and in his Pentecostal services, marked by much sobbing and speaking in tongues, he offers the promise of faith healing to his desperate congregants, a particularly cruel ruse in a country ravaged by HIV.
And the Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, Eighth Bishop of Washington, has this to say:
Mr. Warren has been rightly praised for his efforts to deepen the engagement of evangelical Christians with impoverished Africans. He has been justifiably lauded for putting the AIDS epidemic and global warming on the political agenda of the Christian right. Yet extravagant compassion toward some of God's people does not justify the repression of others. Jesus came to save all of humankind, and as Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pointed out, “All means all.” But rather than embrace the wisdom of Archbishop Tutu, Mr. Warren has allied himself with men such as Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda who seek to “purify” the Anglican Communion, of which my Church is a member, by driving out gay and lesbian Christians and their supporters.
Last night I was on the Sirius/XM program "Make It Plain" with Mark Thompson. A listener called in from Colorado, an Obama supporter and a Christian who works on the front lines of serving the poor. To say she was angry or offended by the Warren choice is not quite accurate: She was wounded, particularly by Warren's denigration of the social justice gospel as inferior to his brand of evangelicalism. "When Rick Warren puts me down," she said, "he's negating our faith."
Chane concludes: "[I]n honoring Mr. Warren, the president-elect confers legitimacy on attitudes that are deeply contrary to the all-inclusive love of God. He is courting the powerful at the expense of the marginalized, and in doing so, he stands the Gospel on its head."
--Sarah Posner
