Speaking to the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Warren himself described his differences with Dobson as “mainly a matter of tone,” and was unable to come up with a theological issue on which they disagree.
He has won plaudits from some journalists for his honesty in forthrightly admitting that he believes that Jews are going to hell, but even if one sees such candor is a virtue, the underlying conviction hardly qualifies him as an ecumenical peacemaker. Warren compares abortion to the Holocaust, gay marriage to pedophilia and incest, and social gospel Christians as “ closet Marxists.” He doesn’t believe in evolution. The truth is that the primary difference between Warren and, say, James Dobson is the former’s penchant for Hawaiian shirts. He’s been known to burn condoms at Makerere University, the prestigious school in Uganda’s capital, and in his Pentecostal services, marked by much sobbing and speaking in tongues, he offers the promise of faith healing to his desperate congregants, a particularly cruel ruse in a country ravaged by HIV. One of his protegés, Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa, has been a major force in moving that country away from its lifesaving safer-sex programs. Yes, Warren has done a lot of work on AIDS in Africa, but he supports the same types of destructive, abstinence-only policies as the Bush administration. He has convinced much of the media and many influential Democrats that he represents a new, more centrist breed of evangelical with a broader agenda than the old religious right. When it comes to his public persona, Warren is something of a magician. First of all, it reifies the image that Warren has been assiduously constructing for himself as “America’s Pastor,” a post-partisan and benevolent figure with a quasi-official role atop the nation’s civic life. Yet this is symbolism with real-world consequences and concrete implications. Obama’s message is: Rick Warren is a part of Obama’s America, too.” At a time of serious life-or-death crises throughout the country, maybe all the sturm and drang over symbolism seems a bit silly to Obama insiders. As the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote on his blog, “gnoring something like Warren, a mainstream figure who commands the respect of million of Americans, would be foolish. Bush, he doesn’t just want to be the president of those who voted for him. Besides, Obama clearly wants to convey that, unlike George W. In the past, one of Obama’s great strengths has been the way he’s made those who disagree with him feel acknowledged and respected. After all, Warren’s participation is a symbolic concession to conservative evangelicals that costs nothing in policy terms as a gesture of goodwill and bridge-building, it’s surely superior to, say, a court appointment. It’s possible that all this anger has taken the Obama team by surprise perhaps they don’t quite understand it. A headline on The Huffington Post described it as Obama’s first real rift with progressives. Many writers described the choice as a slap in the face (a phrase I myself used in a column in the Guardian UK), or said they felt they’d been spit on. Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans.” The president of The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay and lesbian human rights organization, published an open letter to the president-elect, which began, “Let me get right to the point. On the left, reaction to the news that Rick Warren would be giving the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration was swift and furious.
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