Barack Obama is a very intelligent man.  Which is why his invitation of Rick Warren is such a confusing move.  Its his latest fuck you note pinned to the hope that swept him into office  (Jesus’ General has a short and brilliant synopsis).  It would also appear to be a fundamentally naive misunderstanding of what Rick Warren represents.  Rick Warren is an ultra conservative Christian who is actively working to put a mainstream spin on fundamentalist ideas.  As Lindsey Beyerstein notes:

Giving Warren even more mainstream cred is not just a cost-free nod to evangelicals. It’s a boost for someone who actively opposes Obama’s agenda and who is eager to influence secular affairs.

That mainstream cred may be cost-free to the evangelicals, but it comes at a deadly cost to the LGBT community…

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Posted under News, Politics, Religion, Sexuality

The controversial Reverand Wright was uninvited on account of his inflammatory sermons.  Pam Spaulding wonders why Rick Warren won’t be:

So apparently Wright can be given the hook when Obama’s doing political risk assessment, but not Rick Warren. You can draw your own conclusions as to why it’s now possible, even in light of the incredible mother lode of evidence of the extreme anti-gay views of Rick Warren, that Barack Obama doesn’t feel politically inconvenienced enough to dump the Saddleback bigot.

Two reasons jump out at me.  One, that team Obama expects Warren to behave during the inauguration.  The idea is for a voice of the religious right to champion causes he shares with the incoming administration.  Obama is consensus building.  Which leads us into the second reason. Obama isn’t a liberal, no matter how fiercely he was championed by liberals (myself included) and vilified by conservatives.  He is a centrist (albeit an unusually pragmatic one with definite liberal leanings).  As such he has a much wider and more optimistic view of “his base”.  Barack Obama wants to bring evangelicals to the table.  By bringing one of their own to the stage and emphasizing where they are natural allies, perhaps he believes he’ll be able to bridge the many gaps between religious conservatives and the political mainstream.

Since there isn’t likely to be an uninvite with all that at stake, time will tell how well this move plays out.  From the painful experience of being a Democratic, Obama is supremely unlikely to mollify the religious conservative leadership no matter how much he reaches out.  But perhaps this one symbolic act in January will speak the rank and file faithful louder than their conservative religious leadership’s weekly sermons and daily rants.  Perhaps it will be worth the alienating the people who worked so hard to get him into office.

Posted under Politics, Religion