Dobson on Obama

James Dobson has come out with a ferocious and angry attack on Barack Obama with respect to a speech Obama gave almost 2 years to the day on the role of faith in public policy. I think it would be a great disservice to our democracy if either Obama's speech or Dobson's response are reduced to a few decontextualized snippets so I encourage anyone interested to read Obama's whole speech here or view the speech and Dobson's comments here.

Obama asks one simple question in this speech and gives 3 possible answers.
Question: “…how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will?”
Answer 1: Understand BOTH the role of the separation of church and state AND the “robustness of our religious practice”
Answer 2: Translate religiously motivated concerns into universal terms to facilitate dialogue.
Answer 3: “Any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion...on both sides.”

Now some of Dobson’s critiques (excerpted from Time) and some passages in Obama's speech that those critiques ignore or read thinly:
Dobson: "I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology.... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."
Obama: "Even those who claim the Bible's inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ's divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life."

Dobson claims Obama, who is pro-choice, is attempting to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," and has "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution." "Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?"
Obama: "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."

Tom Minnery (also with Focus on the Family): "Many people have called [Sharpton] a black racist, and [Obama] is somehow equating [Dobson] with that and racial bigotry."
Obama: And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's?

Some thoughts:

1. It is clear from the speech that Sen. Obama is a liberal-progressive; but one who believes that faith should have a role in the public sphere. A large portion of the speech is spent chastising secularists for not recognizing American spiritual vitality.
2. I find it surprising that Dobson could not find one good thing to say about the speech even thought the general gist of the speech validates the role of faith in public discourse.
3. Why is Dobson so offended (according to Minnery) by being in the same sentence with Al Sharpton? Obama’s point was exactly that their versions of Christianity are so different that there would be a need for dialogue even if there were only Christian’s in the US. The basic point, and I encourage you to read the whole speech, is the need for religious tolerance—a basic desire for those religious minorities who had fled Europe’s religious persecution from other Christians.
4. I agree that Obama is inartful in phrasing his seeming attack on literalist interpretations of the bible. The need for believers to interpret original dictates should not be framed as the seeming unreasonableness of the original text. However, there’s a point here. Religion involves a translation of the edict into real life.
5. Sadly, there’s a possibility that the discourse of the role of faith in the public sphere is going to be reduced to (i) abortion and (ii) gay marriage—just two of the many issues that people of faith should concern themselves about and two issues that I think have been used to manipulate people of faith for far too long. I think it would be a disservice to our democracy if we cannot discuss how people of different faiths and no faith at all can dialogue in the civic space.
6. Happily, I think this is an opportunity for all people of faith to expand the discourse of faith and politics.

Image: Getty Images via NPR.
Update I: Kirbyjon Caldwell, the Methodist minister who married George W. Bush's daughter has started a website, "James Dobson doesn't speak for Me" with point by point refutations of Dobson's claims.