For those of you who missed it, James Dobson attacked Sen. Obama on Focus on the Family on June 24th, 200 for a great speech Sen. Obama gave at 2006 Sojourners/Call to Renewal Conference which Jim Wallis hosted. Wallis is a liberal evangelical Christian writer and political activist, best known as the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine and of the Washington, D.C.-based Christian community of the same name. Below you will find Jim Wallis's response to Dobson's attack.
Here is Rev. Wallis -
James Dobson, of Focus on the Family Action, and his senior vice president
of government and public policy, Tom Minnery, used their "Focus on the
Family" radio show to criticize Barack Obama's understanding of Christian
faith. In the show, they describe Obama as "deliberately distorting the
Bible," "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter," "willfully
trying to confuse people," and having a "fruitcake interpretation of the
Constitution."
The clear purpose of the show was to attack Barack Obama. On the show,
Dobson says of himself, "I'm not a reverend. I'm not a minister. I'm not a
theologian. I'm not an evangelist. I'm a psychologist. I have a Ph.D. in
child development." Child psychologists don't insert themselves into
partisan politics in the regular way that James Dobson does and has over
many years as one of the premier leaders of the Religious Right. He has
spoken about how often he talked to Republican leaders -- Karl Rove,
administration strategists, and even President Bush himself. This year he
tried to influence the outcome of the Republican primary by saying he would
never vote for John McCain or the Republicans if they nominated him, then
reversed himself and said he would vote after all but didn't say for whom.
But why should America care about how a child psychologist votes?
James Dobson is insinuating himself into this presidential campaign, and his
attacks against his fellow Christian, Barack Obama, should be seriously
scrutinized. And because the basis for his attack on Obama is the speech the
Illinois senator gave at our Sojourners/Call to Renewal event in 2006 (for
the record, we also had Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republicans Rick
Santorum and Sam Brownback speak that year), I have decided to respond to
Dobson's attacks. In most every case they are themselves clear distortions
of what Obama said in that speech. I was there for the speech; Dobson was
not.
I haven't endorsed a candidate, but I do defend them when they are attacked
in disingenuous ways, and this is one of those cases. You can read Obama's
two-year-old speech, which was widely publicized at the time, and you can
see that Dobson either didn't understand it or is deliberately distorting
it. There are two major problems with Dobson's attack on Obama.
First, Dobson and Minnery's language is simply inappropriate for religious
leaders to use in an already divisive political campaign. We can agree or
disagree on both biblical and political viewpoints, but our language should
be respectful and civil, not attacking motives and beliefs.
Second, and perhaps most important, is the role of religion in politics.
Dobson alleges that Obama is saying:
I [Dobson] can't seek to pass legislation, for example, that bans
partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don't see
that as a moral issue. And if I can't get everyone to agree with me, it is
undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the
Scripture. ... What he's trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we
have no right to fight for what we believe.
Contrary to Dobson's charge, Obama strongly defended the right and necessity
of people of faith in bringing their moral agenda to the public square, and
he was specifically critical of many on the left and in his own Democratic
Party for being uncomfortable with religion in politics.
Obama said that religion is and always has been a fundamental and absolutely
essential source of morality for the nation, but he also said that "religion
has no monopoly on morality," which is a point I often make. The United
States is not the Christian theocracy that people like James Dobson seem to
think it should be. Political appeals, even if rooted in religious
convictions, must be argued on moral grounds rather than as sectarian
religious demands -- so that the people (citizens), whether religious or
not, may have the capacity to hear and respond. Religious convictions must
be translated into moral arguments, which must win the political debate if
they are to be implemented. Religious people don't get to win just because
they are religious. They, like any other citizens, have to convince their
fellow citizens that what they propose is best for the common good -- for
all of us, not just for the religious.
Instead of saying that Christians must accept the "the lowest common
denominator of morality," as Dobson accused Obama of suggesting, or that
people of faith shouldn't advocate for the things their convictions suggest,
Obama was saying the exact opposite -- that Christians should offer their
best moral compass to the nation but then engage in the kind of democratic
dialogue that religious pluralism demands. Martin Luther King Jr. perhaps
did this best, with his Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other.
One more note. I personally disagree with how both the Democrats and
Republicans have treated the moral issue of abortion and am hopeful that the
movement toward a serious commitment for dramatic abortion reduction will
re-shape both parties' language and positions. But that is the only "bloody
notion" that Dobson mentions. What about the horrible bloody war in Iraq
that Dobson apparently supports, or the 30,000 children who die each day
globally of poverty and disease that Dobson never mentions, or the genocides
in Darfur and other places? In making abortion the single life issue in
politics and elections, leaders from the Religious Right like Dobson have
violated the "consistent ethic of life" that we find, for example, in
Catholic social teaching.
Dobson has also fought unsuccessfully to keep the issue of the environment
and climate change, which many also now regard as a "life issue," off the
evangelical agenda. Older Religious Right leaders are now being passed by a
new generation of young evangelicals who believe that poverty, "creation
care" of the environment, human trafficking, human rights, pandemic diseases
such as HIV/AIDS, and the fundamental issues of war and peace are also
"religious" and "moral" issues and now a part of a much wider and deeper
agenda. That new evangelical agenda is a deep threat to Dobson and the power
wielded by the Religious Right for so long. It puts many evangelical votes
in play this election year, especially among a new generation who are no
longer captive to the Religious Right. Perhaps that is the real reason for
Dobson's attack on Barack Obama.
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