(this post has been updated after the jump.)
I realize this is last weeks news, but I haven't been blogging because of the holiday and I feel this is an important issue.
Let me start by saying I have never attended Saddleback Church, have never seen Rick Warren speak, have never even read The Purpose-Driven Life. So I cannot say with any degree of certainty what Mr. Warren believes or even espouses from the pulpit.
What I can say is that I was surprised by Obama's pick to deliver the inauguration invocation. I don't care one whit that it is (probably) strictly strategic on the President-elect's part. If his strategy is to unite this increasingly divisive country, than I commend him for actually doing so. Had he picked a far left-minded person to deliver the invocation, it would have scared the socks off of most of the Christians of the nation. The underlying fear theories that have been fed to conservatives that Obama has a radical agenda would have been stoked to high heaven (pardon the pun) before he ever even hit the office. By choosing a very popular and well-known evangelical preacher, with known conservative stances on same-sex marriage and abortion, I believe P.E. Obama might actually mean it when he speaks of "the magic of this country ... we are diverse and noisy and opinionated."
I will spare you all the arguments that have been floating around for days including Obama's own stance on same-sex marriage (he's against it) and his desire to distance himself from the extreme religious men of his past, though I think these are valid. What upset me about the "outcry" of this simple prayer pick was what I heard debated among the talking heads while I ate my frosted flakes.
The word "hate" kept getting thrown around in reference not only to Rick Warren and his controversial statements, but also to anyone who doesn't believe in same-sex marriage. "Hate-mongering," "hate speech" and "position of HATE" were spewed liberally (again with the puns!). Because someone believes that the term "marriage" should be reserved as a reference to the union between a man and a woman does not - and I can't shout this loudly enough - mean that they hate homosexuals. Nothing gets the hairs on my back to stand up more than when Christians are attacked for "intolerance" by someone who is so clearly intolerant towards Christians.
My prayer, as our country progresses and shifts, is that the President-elect continues to make these "across-the-aisle" choices. My prayer is for Rick Warren to touch lives with his invocation.
We have a long, long way to go before we can avoid being labeled as either "hateful" or "hopeful," but with this symbolic gesture I feel like we're trottin' down the path.
My Update:
After I wrote and posted this last night, I went to bed and couldn't stop thinking about it. I wasn't sure my message of the post - that I'm pleased with Obama's "outside his box" choice and that disagreement doesn't constitute HATE - came through the fog of this issue. You see, I differ from many of my fellow Christians because I don't believe homosexuality is a choice, nor do I believe it is something that you can be "healed" or "cured" from.
So the issue of same-sex marriage is a complicated one for me. When I read it to my husband, he concurred that one would probably come away from reading it with a different impression of my thoughts on the issue than they are in reality. I needed to clarify it for my own blogging peace of mind.
peacoat
(picture by prakhar)
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