CGNorena Weekly

A Conversation in a Mega-Church in Southern California

The Choice Between Obama and McCain (I); A Conversation in an Evangelical Mega-Church of Southern California

Last Saturday (8,16.08), Reverend Warren, a much respected evangelical preacher and the extremely successful author of one of the world best-selling books (The Purpose-Driven Life), brought the two Presidential contenders, Barack Obama and John McCain, to answer roughly the same questions in front of a 2,000 audience of Southern Californian evangelical believers  — many, I suppose, from thickly conservatively  Orange County.

Rick Warren had a double purpose: one, to demonstrate that it was possible to disagree in a civil manner; two, to inquire into the depth of the candidates’ Christian values and to give them an opportunity to present their worldviews, namely to confess how their faith had molded their politics. The fact that faith molds politics is both inevitable and justified, as the reverend and this blog willingly assume.

The first purpose was achieved for the most part, a small miracle in our country in 2008. The audience was amazingly polite to both speakers and to their pastor. Reverend Warren  (he said to Larry King after the forum that he admired and respected both candidates) was fair and even humorous, as one could expect from a man of his caliber. The speakers themselves abstained from the mean and often personal trumped-up charges that they “approve’ in their television messages. They were not civil enough, however, to sit down in the same room to answer Reverend Warren’s questions.. After a quick handshake they departed in two different directions: Obama to face the audience; McCain to be “sequestered” in “a cone of silence’ that would deny him the advantage of knowing the questions minutes before he had to find an answer in his scripted repertory. The Obama campaign later on denied that McCain was were the pastor claimed he had been during the questioning, and that, in fact, he had heard the questions in his car radio. We will never know whether such a charge was one more example of the campaign’s mean tone or one more sign of the “ maverick” McCain’s cleverness. There is no doubt, however, that the questions themselves were open temptations for the speakers to pander to their “by invitation only” Christian audience. And they both did their share of pandering The “conversation” began with a straight confession by both candidates that they, yes, believed that Jesus Christ had died for their sins, a tenet of Christian faith that is hard to find in the Sermon on the Mount (Jefferson’s and mine favorite pages of the New Testament) and was first concocted in the mind of Saint Paul (Letter to the Romans) according to some biblical scholars. No matter what the theological ancestry of such thought might be, the truth is that neither Obama nor McCain had before given much evidence of their belief in Jesus as the Redeemer of humanity. But their words gained without any doubt some votes for the final reckoning of November 4.

Obama’s and McCain’s style in answering the questions was radically different.  Obama’s critics (the Neo-cons and the Republicans) found him “convoluted,” “wordy” and not “incisive enough.” To me they were the words of a very thoughtful man constantly involved in the life-long project of finding what is fair, of offerintg solutions rather than seeking applause.  McCain’s opponents –including the author of this blog –found McCain strictly tied up to catch phrases that had proven before to incite applause (as they did), enamored of slogans that sounded like commercials offering  ideologies for sale

One of Reverend Warren’s less felicitous questions was the Reaganesque question about evil. Does evil exist? What is the best response to it: to ignore it, to confront it, to negotiate about it (the word “negotiate” had quite a history in the primaries!), or to defeat it? The question does not make much sense simply because it was maddeningly abstract: evil is a polymorphous reality that calls for an equally polymorphous answer. One does not ignore a lethal cancer nor negotiates with a toothache. Defeating a drought is even more difficult than defeating the Taliban. McCain’s instant response was a response that one could learn in the Naval Academy, but would not help anybody sitting in the Oval Office of the White House.  But McCain did not hesitate (or thought) about the answer: ‘to defeat it,” he said in a heroic voice. The simple answer was simplistic, but, of course, it was loudly applauded. Is this the level of political sophistication the Republican party has descended to? So much for the wisdom of the Orange County’s audience.

Obama’s response immediately denied its Reaganesque overtones: “evil” is primarily what we encounter in our daily life here in America rather than the threat of evil foreign powers bent on destroying the American dream; nations like the Soviet Union whose casualties in the war against Hitler, both military and civilian-  were ten times larger than our own.

Another answer that clearly manifested the different stuff of which Obama and McCain are made off, was, like a mine-field, rich in explosive threats. “Who are the three wisest people you have met in your life? “  Obama, in an intimate mood, humbly admitted that two of the people he thinks are the wisest in his life are his wife who  is frank enough to remind him of his own failures, by simply saying “you screwed that one up”; and his grandmother, who never went to college, but was rich in common sense, the least common of all senses.

McCain, as it is his wont, immediately answered (he seems to avoid thinking) :  ‘General Petraeus.” I must admit that the answer made me feel sorry for our elder Presidential candidate. I am only about ten years older than McCain,  and pity a man who thinks that Petraeus is one of he wisest am he has ever met. The answer was pure campaign rhetoric.  Mc Cain has always relished the phrase that, as President, he would bring the troops back home only when they are victorious and proud (“I would prefer to lose this election than to lose the war”), a phrase that had always drawn fervent applause from the small  crowds he managed to attract, crowds that I guess have totally forgotten the rather shameful American  escape from the roofs of Saigon in 1954. I guess that McCain’s political design was to prepare Americans to morph the fragile and transient success of Petraeus’ “surge” in Baghdad into a historical victory of some kind before the summer of 2009 (!!), the time when American troops are urged to leave Iraq by the most recent move of Iraq’s ‘democratic’ leaders. Petraeus, however, a great general as anyone will admit, was unable or unwilling to say whether the presence of American troops in Iraq helped or not our country’s national security. So much for McCain’s “wisest man.”

Finally, one more question openly revealed the difference between the two men. Reverend Warren (unknowingly perhaps) asked a question that has a long history in western ethical thought, all the way from Aristotle to Pope Benedict XIV: when does human life begin? at what moment is a human fetus endowed with the inalienable rights of a person? The contemporary evangelical answer — very much influenced, believe it or not, by the Vatican’s “culture of life” –is to simply say that life begins at the moment of conception.  From that moment on, any attempt to interrupt a process that naturally (but, not always by any means). ends in a baby, is a sinful abortion, and, according to radical evangelicals, a homicide that should be reported to the local sheriff.

Such an answer, repeated by McCain without a single moment of reflection  is far from being a self-evident truth. On the contrary, it is counter-intuitive and naturally and intelligently subject to doubts, doubts that are the root of the pro-choice versus pro-life controversy and that should make prudent and thoughtful citizens tolerant and respectful of other people’s opinions. McCain’s was the answer of the slightly fanatic, just for a moment, just for political pandering.  Obama’s answer was exactly the opposite: such a question, he answered is “above my pay grade.” In fact, Obama went an inch too far.  :”If that is what you believe,–he said to Warren –there is no discussion possible between you and me. The only thing we can do is to pragmatically discuss in what ways we could minimize the number of abortions in our society” (a position close to that of Hillary Clinton).

I have a different attitude. Even if I accept the fact that a knockout counter-argument for choice does not always work, I think that there are ways to debilitate the rashness and anger of the pro-life champions. Here are a few questions for such people:
If a fetus — something you see only with a microscope or a good magnifying glass – is a person as you and me,
-why Christians never have funerals for fetuses?
-why even Catholics do not bury fetuses in Catholic cemeteries but dispose of them in ways I am not willing to descrihe??
-why does the Bible totally avoids saying ANYTHING about fetuses?-
_why does the  Catholic Church allow Catholic women who have been raped to take pills to prevent the fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus?
-why does nature (or ultimately, God) allow  millions of implanted fertilized eggs to be naturally aborted before birth?
And so on and so on.

Mr. McCain’s rash judgment based on ignorance is certainly not the ideal quality for a possible Commander in Chief, particularly at 3 am when the red telephone of immortal fame rings through the corridors of the White House.

Please, vote for Obama!

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In Praise of Islam

During the Great Awakening of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin donated money to the building of a great hall in Philadelphia for preachers to use, including, he said, “the Great Mufti of Constantinople,” the chief Muslim adviser to the Ottoman Sultan.  That was the America of the Founders, the America I chose as my adopted country, not the America of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, both of whom made obnoxious comments on Islam.

Today, the Republican opponents of Barack Obama have spread the rumor that Obama is not a Christian, but a Muslim. Unfortunately, they mean that as an insult, while it could and should very well be a compliment, as it is to one billion peaceful Muslim believers throughout the world, including one million American Muslims and two members of the House of Representatives. By doing that they are responsible for reinforcing one of the most severe threats to our national security – which Republicans claim to be “their” strong domain–, the growing hostility between the Christian (?) West and the Muslim world, a somber distortion of the western media and the ominous background of President Bush’s delusional concoction about “the Global War on Terror.”

Although I am not a Muslim and was raised by a Catholic mother in Spain (!), I have always felt an irrepressible admiration for Islam, the religious belief of Muslims. To me to be a Muslim means much more than some kind of ethnic identity, as when we say that the former Yugoslavia  included Catholic Croats, Christian Orhodox Serbians, and Muslim Bosnians. It is also in that sense that we sometimes say that somebody is a Jew, meaning only that his father is a Jew, whether the person we are talking about is an atheist or a practical agnostic. It also means some thing radically different: a political ideology that professes a total effort, including violent means, to bring about the restoration of Sharia  (Muslim Law) in Islamic societies against a secularizing West. The icon of such ideology is Osama Bin Laden, whom I consider an abomination of Islam rather than an authentic Muslim.

The Islam I admire is the most uncompromising form of  monotheism in the history of religion. The only fully human response to Allah (“The God”)  is the total surrender  (“islam” means submission) of  humans to a unique God  whose nature remains transcendent and ineffable. In comparison with Christian dogmas about the Holy Trinity or the incarnation of God in Jesus, Islam passionately proclaims that Allah is the only God, and Mohammed is his prophet. No Muslim has ever been even tempted to believe that Mohammed was divine. In fact, Muslims delight in being reminded of the humanity of Mohammed. In sharp contrast with the Gospels, the traditions (the Hadith) about Mohammed’ life give us a healthy account of the Prophet’s sexual prowess. A Muslim philosopher, al-Ghazzali, wrote without hesitation that if the pleasure of sex could last forever, it would be very similar to life in Paradise. Apparently, Mohammed thought along those ways.

The Koran is not a theology about Allah’s nature, but a discourse about the moral response of humans to their divine Creator and Legislator. It is not an “orthodoxy’ (right opinion), but an orthopraxy (right behavior). The mesmerizing simplicity of Islam  was defiled by the contact of Muslim scholars with Hellenistic culture in Syria, but in most cases they bound themselves to specify the limits of human knowledge about God (we only know what God is not, the so-called “via negativa”) and to inquire about the “anthropomorphic” (human-like) language about the “Altogether Otherness” of Allah. Although these philosophical clarifications deviated somehow from the initial and appealing simplicity of Islam, they had a decisive influence upon medieval Christian philosophers and Theologians. My first contact with Islam was through Saint Thomas’ Summa Theologica.  Even now I hear echoes of Maimonides and ibn-Sina (Avicenna) in the writings of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.  Maimonides, a Spanish Jewish philosopher who wrote in Arabic, explained to the “perplexed” what is the acceptable meaning of speaking about God’s “hands,’ “face’, His “throne,’ etc . How can the incorporeal sit on a throne? He then came to the amazing conclusion that God’s “love” is not like any love we know, that God “is” not like anything that we know to be, that God namely  remains ineffable to humans, no matter how many volumes of theology (the science Kant thought to be impossible) you might find in the Library of Congress. It is wiser to keep in silence about “those matters we cannot speak of “(Wittgenstein).

All the religions of the Book– Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are different attempts to speak about the same and unique God we worship in silence, frustrated efforts to speak about the ineffable, culturally different acts of submission to the same God who created all of us equal in aspirations, doubts, and fundamental beliefs. The distinctive and different features of each revelation are historically and culturally important, but should not be divisive nor religiously relevant. They deserve respect, but they do not demand unquestionable submission. As post-Kantians philosophers have acknowledged, the failure of metaphysics has become the metaphysics of failure.

Thus, Islam is an open invitation to the deistic attitude of the Founding Fathers’ religious beliefs, to their tenets on the separation of church and state, and to their global tolerance toward all religions. Their basis was the equality of ALL (not only Americans) humans vis a vis their One Creator, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Deists believe that all religious beliefs proceed from the same God and lead to the same God.

Islam’s detachment from vain speculation about the nature of Allah is made clear by the very fact that Islam, unlike Christianity, does not claim to have an infallible guide of orthodoxy, like the Catholic Pope is supposed to be. The only guide is the universal consensus of the ulama, the community of Muslim scholars, a radically democratic concept of religious authority. The only exception to this fundamental attitude is the role of enlightened  mullahs in Shiite Islam. Iran’s Khomeini in Iran, as Shi’ism itself, represents a tragic figure in the history of modern Islam. But, soon perhaps, an Iranian Ataturk will bring the powerful nation of Iran to a Turkey-like replica of a secularized society, the future of all Muslim societies according to experts on Islam. Iran’s educated university youth, like the youth of Kazahstan, is already on its way to Ataturk.

Muslims reject original sin, an extremely difficult notion: how can  a baby who is one-hour old be considered a sinner? Consequently, there is no redeemer, much less a redeemer who is a God incarnated, a blasphemy to Muslims. In Islam, there is no celibate priesthood, no pope, no sacraments, no church.  The Koran introduces us to Mohammed as the exemplar of moral conduct. The traditions about Mohammed complete such characterization. To me the mosque of Cordoba, now a Catholic Cathedral, remains as the symbol of religious tolerance, the ideal of a peaceful harmony of all humans equal to each other in their beliefs and their doubts.

And it is precisely in this aspect that the Islamic model fails in part to fully convince the modern reader. After all, Mohammed’s mission in his lifetime was to lift up the moral code of a tribal society of desert Bedouins. In his harshest commands- as the stoning of women caught in adultery. the punishment of theft,  or the injunctions about lending money on interest (the foundation of modern capitalism), Mohammed’s moral rules were not able to significantly transcend the Semitic vindictiveness of compensatory punishment (an eye for an eye) or the severity of the Jewish Leviticus. Jefferson was totally right in his admiration for Jesus’ never upgraded moral loftiness and noble mindedness.

Both Christianity and Islam have both impeccable and dark pages in their history. The bloodiness of the Inquisition  (originally a French institution better known toady in its horrible Spanish embodiment) and the devastation of the Crusades– initially led by a saint that is venerated as an icon of Christian kindness, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux — have little to do with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mountain. Islam, too, has had and is having at this very moment, a history of violent intolerance. As leader of the Muslim community of Medina, however, Mohammed tried very hard  (not always successfully) to keep peace with Jews and Christians, both of whom eventually would be free to practice their religion provided they paid a special tax. The sections of the Koran that deal with the Medina period are rich in moral precepts.  The fragile peace of Medina was, however, reenacted in the Spanish el-Andalus (Andalucia) all the way from the ninth to the twelfth century, a time when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in peaceful and creative harmony, a harmony that transformed the cultural landsca- pe of  pre-Renaissance Europe..

Human beings of all cultures cannot permit that the hostility between the West and Islam lead to mushroom clouds in the sky of our planet. It is our deepest obligation to bring back the tolerance of the Founders, to change American foreign policy in the world. I think Obama can do it, and I am sure that McCain (“a man of the previous century,” as a French journalist characterized him last week) cannot even think about it,