Barack Obama: The Hijacking of the Faith
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Sen. Barack Obama told a church convention Saturday that some right-wing evangelical leaders have exploited and politicized religious beliefs in an effort to sow division.“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in remarks prepared for delivery before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ.
“Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us,” the Illinois senator said.
“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design,” according to an advance copy of his speech.
“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich,” Obama said. “I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.”
Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, a church of about 1.2 million members that is considered one the most liberal of the mainline Protestant groups.
In 1972, the church was the first to ordain an openly gay man. Two years ago, the church endorsed same-sex marriage, the largest Christian denomination to do so. Obama believes that states should decide whether to allow gay marriage, and he opposes a constitutional amendment against it.
Besides the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ has been the most outspoken and resolute in its insistence that the Body of Christ include all persons.
posted by The AoM at 6/24/2007 06:59:00 AM
3 Comments:
See my take on gay marriage at http://bubbasoundsoff.com/2007/06/24/response-to-orson-scott-card-2/
nnnnnnnnnnnnn
June 25th, '07
Senator Obama is right to assert that religion has been high-jacked in this country. For several years now religious Republican extremists--from all churches including the Mormon church and its religious political operative David McConkie who shoves Mormonism down peoples' throats and defames people as heathens if a person is not Mormon plus plenty of other "religious" people who in actuality are loud-mouth chronic complainers who never are satisfied with anything but instead persist in ranting their morality to others--have wrongly used religion to among other things get out of paying taxes.
These religious Republican extremists sow division and hatred of people against each other because in their holier-than-thou attitudes they make one group believe it's hated by another faction and so on and etc. until they "divide and conquer" which I consider is their sinister strategy to take over. These are the people who advocate state-financed churches, no different than that which existed in the early years of our Republic and was despised by our Founder George Washington the same as Thomas Jefferson hated state-sanctioned churches, and indeed manipulate the tax laws and exploit the law's loopholes to avoid paying taxes on the one hand but then get funding from the state on the other hand.
How morally audacious these loud-mouth religious rebel-rousers are! Why they're nothing more than devils themselves, in sheep's clothing, waiving the christian Bible like they've got a monopoly on divine wisdom when in fact these people are the ones who are ignorant heathens!
Good, for Senator Obama. Somebody needs to tell the truth about these religious hooligans, who call themselves righteous, exploiting religion to spew their wickedness into society as a whole.
Sincerely,
Kathy Caudle
Salt Lake City, UT
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