When it comes to faith, Obama (mostly) gets it
No person, at least no knowledgeable person, could read the text of President Barack Obama’s speech to the National Prayer Breakfast last week and come away thinking he’d insulted or disparaged religion.
Instead, the speech is an homage to faith, and to a particularly sophisticated approach to faith that would benefit us all for the hearing, if only we had ears to hear.
That doesn’t mean, of course, the president got everything right. (Going to the speech in the first place was a questionable call, especially since Obama went out of his way to highlight the separation of church and state in his remarks. How the head of state joining with other key figures in government and faith leaders serves to separate church and state rather than bring them together is an open question.)
But let’s take a look at some of the president’s remarks and explain why they’re either commonsense statements of fact or rather insightful approaches to practicing one’s faith for the benefit of all. My comments are in italics after the quoted passages.
• Obama goes easy on Islam?: “But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”
Tell me again how Obama refuses to insult Muslim extremism? Because the last I checked, that school in Pakistan and that attack in Paris were perpetrated by Muslim extremists, like ISIL members of — what’s Obama’s phrase? — “a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.” Yeah, that’s not exactly blowing kisses to radical Islam.
So why, you may ask, doesn’t he use the phrase “radical Islam,” or “Muslim extremism” or the Fox favorite, “Islamofascism”? Well, he is the head of state, in a war not only of bullets but of rhetoric with the purveyors of religious-based violence. He doesn’t want to give the enemy a recruiting tool or a rhetorical victory, any more than a battlefield victory. But this notion that the prayer breakfast speech proves Obama is a secret Muslim is too ridiculous for anybody but the true Obama-haters to embrace.
• The most controversial thing he said: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Face it, folks: These are facts. People killed and oppressed others in the name of Christianity, and some still seek to do so. (I saw one commentator on Fox News try to push the blame onto the Spanish government for the Inquisition, as if it could have or would have happened without the influence of the church.) And yes, I acknowledge this is old news: The Crusades happened between 1096 and 1291, and the Inquisition kicked of in 1232. Today, the problem of killing or oppression in the name of Christ is largely under control, while there’s been a marked rise in the bloodshed connected to Islam. But the president’s point wasn’t to say that Christianity and Islam are equally bad; his point was that both religions could be expropriated to evil ends. This is factually, demonstrably and unarguably true.
Don’t believe it? Read beyond what you may have heard on Fox or CNN: “This is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try.”
He’d probably also like it if we tried to understand the substance of another person’s remarks before slamming that person on TV, but that’s probably a little too much to ask.
• Humility as the key to faith: “And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.
“Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments. And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process.”
This is a very sophisticated understanding of faith, and an accurate one. The fact is, humans can only struggle to understand the creator and sustainer of the universe that they are just now taking the smallest baby steps to explore. If we can’t explain the fundamental forces of the universe in which we live, how can we possibly claim to have anything but the most childlike understanding of the God who created those forces and set the entire thing in motion?
Yet the history of humans on the planet is scarred with repeated instances of conflict over the notion of the divine, wars begun because one person’s belief about God didn’t conform precisely to another’s. And yet in most of those faiths, there is the idea that God loves his creations and that, as a result, we should love each other and treat each other as we’d like to be treated, a point the president gets to later in his remarks.
It seems to me that a little faith is required here, faith that God may speak to others differently than he speaks to us, for purposes of his own beyond our meager understanding. Allowing for that possibility may be uncomfortable, but, as the president suggests, a little humility goes a long way.
• Um, yeah…: “No God condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.”
Well, let’s not get too far afield, Mr. President. After all, did not God in I Samuel 15 command his servants to smite Amalekites, killing man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass, in recompense for injuries inflicted by that people upon Israel? Did not God command Abraham in Genesis to kill Abraham’s son in ritual sacrifice as a test of faith (staying his hand at the crucial moment, to be sure, but not until he was convinced Abraham was prepared to do the deed)? Did not God command his followers in Deuteronomy Chapter 20 to conquer the promised land and destroy races such as Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, lest their pagan beliefs draw the Israelites’ faith from God?
These Bible stories are hard to explain, especially in light of God’s earlier command in Exodus to “do no murder” and the New Testament emphasis on love and service to others. Again, these are facts, facts that some believers will try with great efforts to explain away in order to preserve pristine their understanding of God. But those passages are every bit a part of the book as the poetic, even majestic, passages that encourage us to locate our basic humanity and build a better world to honor the God who created us all. Remember, as the president said, we are all of us staggering and stumbling toward God with an incomplete, confused understanding of who he is.
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T: “But part of humility is also recognizing in modern, complicated, diverse societies, the functioning of these rights, the concern for the protection of these rights calls for each of us to exercise civility and restraint and judgment. And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults — (applause) — and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks. Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t question those who would insult others in the name of free speech. Because we know that our nations are stronger when people of all faiths feel that they are welcome, that they, too, are full and equal members of our countries.”
Here I part ways with the president, at least somewhat. Yes, as a matter of civility and good manners, it’s boorish to insult the deeply held beliefs of others. But if those beliefs are inimical to a pluralistic, diverse society, our tolerance must be limited. For example, if someone posits that beheading is an acceptable, predictable or even understandable punishment for insulting the Prophet Muhammad, we shouldn’t be caught standing idly by and saying, “Well, it’s not my way, but I understand.” Rather, we must recognize that the time has come to set aside good manners and reply with a strong rebuke that such Bronze Age nonsense has no place in modern society, and that no matter what a person says or thinks or writes, violence of any kind is never an acceptable response, and anyone who believes that it is, much less acts on those beliefs, is simply a barbarian who deserves society’s universal condemnation.
Let’s stand shoulder to shoulder on that principle, shall we, lest our liberal sensibilities cause us to (quite literally) lose our heads! As the president himself said, “No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives.” And those who speak their mind — even if they do so with boorish, ill intent — are nonetheless innocent of any transgression worthy of a violent response.
• Amen, Mr. President: “And the second thing we need is to uphold the distinction between our faith and our governments. Between church and between state. The United States is one of the most religious countries in the world — far more religious than most Western developed countries. And one of the reasons is that our founders wisely embraced the separation of church and state.”
And while the president missed a golden opportunity to say precisely why this is a good thing — there’s few things more evil than people compelled to worship against their true beliefs, especially at the compulsion of a civil government — it was still important to include this idea in his remarks. It goes sadly unrecognized by people of faith who want to blur the line of separation between church and state that the line exists to protect both from each other, and that usually when the line has been erased in history, the sacred has been corrupted by the secular, not the other way around.
• And finally today: “And, finally, let’s remember that if there is one law that we can all be most certain of that seems to bind people of all faiths, and people who are still finding their way towards faith but have a sense of ethics and morality in them — that one law, that Golden Rule that we should treat one another as we wish to be treated. The Torah says ‘Love thy neighbor as yourself.’ In Islam, there is a Hadith that states: ‘None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.’ The Holy Bible tells us to ‘put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’ Put on love.”
…
“If we are properly humble, if we drop to our knees on occasion, we will acknowledge that we never fully know God’s purpose. We can never fully fathom His amazing grace. ‘We see through a glass, darkly’ — grappling with the expanse of His awesome love. But even with our limits, we can heed that which is required: To do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.”
It would be difficult to formulate a better approach to religion in a pluralistic society than the president has outlined here, using almost entirely quotes lifted from different passages of Scripture. Those passages, like all of Scripture itself contain a choice: They can be fashioned into a blood-soaked scythe used to murder, or into a plowshare to sow a harvest of love, compassion and hope, a blessing to humanity rather than a terrible burden. It’s not hard to figure out which one the president prefers. And anyone who honestly reads his words will come to that same conclusion.
