President Obama’s campaign recently launched an outreach group, African Americans for Obama. But the church he depicts in the ad when appealing to Christians to support his campaign is actually a conservative Virginia church. Its website contains a “pro-life info” section, and its pastor told The Washington Examiner that he will not allow Obama or any other candidate to set up a “congregational captain” among their faithful.
The campaign ad includes video footage of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Manassas (Va.) while Obama, speaking over the video, asks people to rally supporters in their “faith community.”
“We don’t do an official endorsement of any political campaign,” the Rev. Dr. William Allen Church, pastor of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Manassas, said. “But because of our conservative theology, biblical points of view — for instance, we’re pro-life and that sort of thing — so the practical implications of that come into play when people go cast their ballot,” he said. “But I do not give a precise endorsement, whatsoever.”
The pastor noted that historically African-American churches exist in the neighborhood, but his church does not identify as such. “We are multi-racial, but we don’t describe ourselves according to race,” he said. Church also said that — with respect to political allegiances — the congregation is mostly composed of Republicans and independents, with “maybe some Democrats.”
The political differences between Obama and the church are fairly apparent even on the church website, which features a “pro-life info” page that explains why the congregation believes that abortion is unbiblical and directs women to a local crisis pregnancy center. “In the future, they might want to do more careful research for that sort of thing,” Church suggested.
The church did not know the building would be depicted in the ad before seeing it in Obama’s video. The pastor said they have no relationship with the campaign. “The only relationship is that we do pray for all of our civil authorities,” the pastor said.
Rev. Pat Mahoney, whose ordination ceremony took place in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Manassas, said that the use of the video reflects Obama’s insensitivity to Christian communities. “It shows how the Obama administration treats faith as an absolute commodity,” Mahoney, head of the Christian Defense Coalition, said. “They just wanted what they thought was a pleasant-looking church.”
Church agreed that his church was featured “more for convenience” than any other reason, but was not as offended as Mahoney. “It’s amusing more than it was offensive,” he said, but allowed that “it would have been a totally different issue if the president had stood in front of the church or had the church been depicted throughout most of his presentation.”
