Religion and Politics

Sometimes I wonder if anyone can have an intelligent opinion about politics in America any more. Our headlines read like tabloids because it's all about the eyeballs in these, the last days, of the news media giants.

Sunday I was sitting in our men's group class and the discussion floated to politics. Being a church in Houston, TX, and affiliated with a Protestant denomination, there is a strong bent towards conservatism and the Republican party. The conversation quickly degenerated into Obama bashing. Usually, I just keep my mouth shut and ignore it, but when one of the men said Obama promised to get us out of Iraq, and we are still there, I couldn't contain myself. "Really?" I said, "we're still in Iraq after five months of the Obama administration and he's already broken that promise?" "Did you expect him to take office and then pull all of our troops out the next day?" Everyone in the room started to shift in their seats a bit. I think I was probably raising my voice and sounding like a crazed liberal at this point. I regret that.

Finally, he admitted that he just didn't like President Obama. My response was, okay, there we go - you are just biased. There's nothing wrong with being biased. I voted for Obama, so I'm a bit biased myself. What bothers me is when we demonize those in office. Obama isn't evil incarnate, and neither was George W. Bush. Both have made mistakes. I think all this government spending is a HUGE mistake personally. Government spending is actually one of the reasons I didn't vote for the Republican party. I felt that the Republicans had become as reckless with their spending as the Democrats. The Democrats have done their best to prove me wrong on that one.

And yet, the steps the Obama administration has begun to take to stop torture are the right direction. (Recently I've heard some things that make me wonder if he is going to back down on this issue). I think today, we as a nation are just beginning to earn back the respect of the world.

I get pretty emotional about this issue. How are we going to have productive conversations about the direction of our nation if we demonize those who disagree with us, labeling them as generally bad people. On the flip-side, how can we hope to better ourselves when we lionize the party we align ourselves with?

I don't know if you saw the controversial picture of the Obama's that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker. Personally, I found it hilarious. It portrayed them in their highly demonized form showing how ridiculous were the rumors flying around them. Vanity Fair did the same for the McCain camp and it's equally as ridiculous.

Addendum (5/19/2009):
I am adding here a quote from President Obama's speech last night at Notre Dame. Specifically he speaks to the controversy surrounding his speaking at a Catholic school when he is personally an avid pro-choice supporter. I think it speaks right to what I've been discussing above:

As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called "The Audacity of Hope." A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an e-mail from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the Illinois primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life -- but that was not what was preventing him potentially from voting for me.

What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website -- an entry that said I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose." The doctor said he had assumed I was a reasonable person, he supported my policy initiatives to help the poor and to lift up our educational system, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words." Fair-minded words.

After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn’t change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that -- when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe -- that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground. - Barak Obama (italics mine)