Alan Wolfe on What Rick Warren's Acceptance of Obama's Invitation Really Means

Crossposted, with a few minor edits, from The Way of Improvement Leads Home

By John Fea

Alan Wolfe is optimistic about a future progressive turn among American evangelicals.

Writing in today's New Republic, Wolfe sees Rick Warren's acceptance of Obama's invitation to pray at the inauguration as a sign that evangelicals are moving out of their own secluded subculture and into the mainstream of American (political?) culture. Despite what many liberals and members of the LGBT community seem to think, Wolfe argues that Warren's willingness to accept Obama's invitation is more important than Obama offering it. Warren's acceptance of Obama's invitation, according to Wolfe, will (and has already) resulted in backlash from the more conservative wing of American evangelicalism. Wolfe's hope is that "Obama's election will lead the more extreme right-wing Christians to purge their ranks of people such as (Richard) Cizek (sic)--and Warren. Maybe we should encourage them to do so, for this will weaken them politically by drawing them even further from the center."

I am struck by four things about Wolfe's short piece.

First, Wolfe understands, unlike much of the recent press coverage, that Warren, despite his opposition to gay marriage and support of California's Proposition 8, is indeed a different kind of evangelical than those who associate with the Religious Right. Warren represents evangelicals concerned with cultural and political engagement in a way strikingly different from folks like Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson. He represents evangelicals concerned with the poor, global suffering, health care, and climate control. Warren does see eye-to-eye with the Religious Right on gay marriage, as most evangelicals do, but he stands more for the future of the movement than its past. This may seem like splitting hairs, but the difference is important. It goes a long way toward explaining why Warren accepted Obama's invitation.

Second, I think Wolfe, who seems somewhat giddy about the way that Warren's acceptance of Obama's offer to pray has divided evangelicals, is overly optimistic about evangelicals changing their minds about gay marriage and other social issues. Wolfe has studied evangelicals, but I am not sure he really knows them. The Christian college where I teach (a place where Wolfe will be visiting in the spring) has recently been addressing the question of Christian homosexuals. In fact, there have been some members of the student body who have been open about their homosexuality and have been interviewed for a feature story in the college newspaper. But despite these isolated cases, most college students I encounter at my particular Christian college (a Christian college often accused by conservative evangelicals of being too "liberal") still uphold traditional views of marriage and would be opposed to thinking about this social institution any other way.

Third, I DO think that Wolfe's accomodation thesis has some merits. Evangelicals, remember, are Protestants. And ever since the Reformation Protestants have felt free to change their interpretation of the Bible on a whim. Evangelicals have made this an art form. Wolfe, in other words, has evangelical history on his side. The story of American evangelicalism has always, as historians such as Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll have suggested, been one of cultural accomodation. (I make a similar argument, drawing from Noll and others, in The Way of Improvement Leads Home). I just think, as I argued in the previous paragraph, accomodation on gay marriage is going to take a lot longer than Wolfe projects.

Fourth, Wolfe writes as if Rick Warren, as an evangelical pastor, is breaking new ground by accepting Obama's invitation to pray. "Warren's decision to accept an invitation from a liberal president," Wolfe notes, "is as clear a symbol of the entry of evangelicals into mainstream culture as one can imagine." If this is the case, then what does Wolfe make of Billy Graham's decision to pray at both of Bill Clinton's inauguration ceremonies? (Graham was also a part of Lyndon Johnson's inaugural festivities). Clinton may not have been as "liberal" as Obama, but he was certainly pro-choice, pro-gay, and, if I remember correctly, drew intense heat for it from the evangelical community.

Faith and Politics

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

A few weeks ago I posted about Edward Curtis's new encyclopedia on Muslim-American history and Thomas Kidd's latest offering on the history of evangelicals and Islam in America. American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism is now available, as is Kidd's HNN piece on the attempt by some evangelicals to paint Barack Obama as a Muslim. Kidd brings some historical clarity to these claims, and calls for some much needed cosmopolitan thinking on the matter.

Here's the first part of Kidd's informative and brief historical summary:

During this year’s presidential campaign, widely-circulated e-mails claimed that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim. “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim,” one version of the e-mail asserted. “Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background. ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran.” Setting aside the factual problems with this e-mail (the swearing-in claim confused Obama, a long-time practicing Christian, with Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim elected to Congress), how has the prospect of a secret Muslim as President taken such a prominent place among the cyber-myths of this election?

One might easily point to the fear of Muslim extremists generated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a contributing factor to this rumor about Obama. The prominent role of evangelical Christians in American politics might be another cause. Anxiety about Islam has particular resonance among conservative Protestants: polls have consistently demonstrated that contemporary evangelicals have a substantially more negative view of Islam than other Americans. But American fears about Muslims precede 9/11 by hundreds of years, with origins as early as the founding of the first English colonies in America. History also shows conflicted American attitudes toward Islam, even among conservative Christians, whose views of Islam have ranged from studied respect to apocalyptic revulsion.

Read the rest of the article here and find a copy of the book here.

Don’t Fear the Pistol-Packing Pentecostal (For Being a Pistol-Packing Pentecostal)

By Matt Sutton

It is true. I have been unfaithful. While my ultimate loyalties are to this blog, I have been on occasion posting elsewhere. Here is what I promise will be my last word on Sarah Palin (unless she and McCain actually win).

Sarah Palin has problems. A lot of them. Nevertheless, we have nothing to fear from her faith. Ever since John McCain announced that the pistol-packing, moose-dressing, beehive-sporting hockey mom from Alaska was his vice presidential nominee, journalists, bloggers, Democrats and even the cast of Saturday Night Live have all been in a fury. Does Palin speak in tongues? Does she believe that the battle of Armageddon is imminent? Does she believe in casting out demons? Does she talk to God? Does she believe the Rapture is coming?

The answer to all of these questions is probably yes. But so what?

The rest of the article is here, over at the History News Network.

No God But Country

Paul Harvey

At Religion Dispatches, Katie Lofton provides an analysis of religious rhetoric and the election singlehandedly worth more than an entire year's stack of controversy-of-the-day political commentary. Dispensing with (while also explaining) the surface trivia of this or that campaign controversy flareup, Katie explores the strikingly areligious yet highly pietistic world of John McCain. So, turn off the TV and get busy with this substantive analysis instead. A brief excerpt here:

It matters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, precisely, the realities of religion. In some contrast to the pursuits of journalism, the religionist does not anticipate the craven, presuming that all words of faith are pandering rhetoric meant to appease men with guns and girls with God(s). Rather, our job is to collect the available artifacts of religion (words and acts supplied in archive or public record) and render an analysis of the subject. For students of religion, this analysis is not an inherently apolitical exercise, but it is, at its best, one disentangled from theological prescription. Somehow, without a God (but not, as we will see, without a powerful creed) John McCain has forged for himself a moral mode, a discourse, a rhetoric of righteousness. What, then, ought it matter whether he is or is not, technically speaking, Christian?

Palin and the Pastors

by Matt Sutton

For those of you who missed it, Sarah Palin has (in my mind) done the unthinkable. She has resurrected the Jeremiah Wright debate, telling Bill Kristol (in this morning's New York Times):

“To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association [Obama-Wright] isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

I did not think that it was fair to critique Palin (or Obama) for past associations. But if she is going to go after Obama over Wright, let the games begin. I suspect that things are about to get pretty ugly.

"Left" Out: Faith and Politics

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere



In July 2007 Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy famously wrote about the Democratic Party and religion, and religion scholars in recent years have started to tell us about the history of the religious left.

So, to use the title of the Gibbs and Duffy article, have Democrats "got religion"? And who are the "party faithful"? Here are some answers.

The award-winning radio program Speaking of Faith aired a show yesterday on the "faith history" of the political left. It is the first in a series on religion and the major political parties during election season. The SOF website states:

This program is the first of a two-part conversation on politics and religion below the surface of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The religious right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility.


This show is a good conversation piece (pardon the pun) for a number of recent books that examine religion and the Democratic Party and/or political progressives, including Amy Sullivan's book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (interviewed on the show), E.J. Dionne's , Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, and David Gushee's The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, among others.

(Paul Harvey also posted on some of these books early this year).