President Obama’s relationship with American Christians has become front page news after the commander in chief made critical remarks about distant Christian history while discussing this week’s burning alive of a Jordanian prisoner by the Islamic State.
Obama cited the Crusades and American slavery as historic examples in which leaders were able to “twist and distort” religious faith during a high-profile speech at Thursday’s National Prayer breakfast.
Negative responses to the president’s comments have extended beyond Christian conservatives, whose relationship with the president has often been fraught, to include more mainstream believers.
On Friday, MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski, who leans politically to the left, said, “I think the timing is bad.”
Her co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, called Obama’s remarks a “stupid, left-wing moral equivalence.”
“I think he was reverting to his post-presidency academic mode where he wanted to draw these historical moral equivalencies, as you say,” chimed in Sam Stein, politics editor of the liberal Huffington Post.
The National Catholic Register, a Catholic news publication, said, “The examples cited by the president were inapt to describe the situation in the Middle East.”
The outrage has reached America’s mainstream media, though big news organizations have largely depicted the dispute as a familiar skirmish between Obama and conservatives. In a front page story Friday, the Washington Post unveiled the headline, “Imploring Christians to recall history, Obama offends some.”
During his speech, Obama condemned violence committed in the name of Islam. He followed that remark, however, by equating radical Islam to slavery in the U.S. and the Crusades.
“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,” Obama said, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
The Post cited Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who called Obama’s comments “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison.”
The Christian Science Monitor attempted to explain the comparison under the headline, “Why did Obama compare Crusades to Islamic State at prayer breakfast?”
A New York Times article also highlighted the new contention between Obama and Christian conservatives, quoting former Republican Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Methodist. “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” he said.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said in a statement that “Obama’s ignorance is astounding and his comparison is pernicious.”
Obama is far from the first president to point out the irony of leaders using religion to justify barbarism, war and slavery. In his second inaugural address in 1865, Abraham Lincoln noted that the triumphant North and collapsing South were both populated by practicing Christians.
“Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other,” Lincoln said. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”
But the backlash to the president’s lecture, which came in the midst of a long and horrifying wave of violence by Islamists all over the world, has included Christians who are not typically affiliated with conservative politics. In the mainstream National Catholic Reporter, columnist Michael Sean Winters, author of Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats, called for the National Prayer Breakfast to be abolished and deplored the tendency of presidents “to speak about things they should not speak about and say things about religion that are deeply cynical.”
