Obamamania: “Secret Chords?”

PLEASE NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED

You may access it here:
http://www.upfromfundamentalism.com/2008/07/obamamania-secret-chords/

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I haven’t figured out how to display the comments all at once and respond to them serially – which is what I would like to do — so I have called in some help. In the mean time, let me respond to the comments as I understand the claims.

ANDREW, KENNY and BEN

It seems to me that Andrew has focused our discussion on the right question but I will quibble with how it is framed. It is overstated to frame it as broadly as “Can a pro-life Christian never vote for a pro-choice person?” That is not the issue.

Obviously, as Edmund Burke or maybe Russell Kirk once said, politics is the art of the possible, and is not a purely idealistic exercise. So, when one votes one must consider the candidates, the alternative candidates, and the practical issue about whether the candidate themselves will have any opportunity to exercise power on the abortion issue. Obviously, the abortion decision might not have any play in a choice between 2 pro-abortion candidates. If we were picking between Giuliani and Obama, this would be a much less important presidential race in my mind. Important, but much less important.

The important question is: Does Abortion control Presidential politics until Roe v. Wade is squarely overturned?

Or, as is suggested by other posts, do other political considerations — the war, poverty programming, and so on — have any purchase on this decision?

My answers are YES and NO. For me, Abortion controls the Presidential decision until this is resolved. Until this dark period in our moral history is over, I am a 1 issue voter. And I don’t understand how any serious Christian can be otherwise. The magnitude of the evil of abortion controls all other questions in a Presidential election until it is resolved.

This is particularly true in the Presidential election, because it is the President who decides who is appointed to the Supreme Court, and right now, friends, we are on the edge of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The current vote is 5-4 in favor of Roe. A shift of 1 judge can end it, and it is fairly certain that at least 2 judges will be appointed by the next nominee. Both Justice Stevens and Ginsburg are very likely retirements, and Scalia is a possibility. If EITHER Stevens or Ginsburg are replaced with a judge that sees Roe properly, then Roe is OVER, and Abortion numbers probably drop dramatically shortly thereafter. This reality means that the next President decides the question. Plain and simple.

If the claim from the Xian Obama supporters is that other issues ought to inform our decision as well — important issues like the war, or the environment, amount of federal spending, etc.,  I could appreciate that in any other context, and I would be much less surprised by the Xian who supports Obama.

But Abortion is the primary political and moral fact in our nation. You must equivocate on either the morality of abortion or the signficance of its evil to vote for Obama at this moment in history.

It is true that it is certainly possible for McCain to pick the wrong judges. But if Obama wins, it is very clear that he will appoint 2 judges, maybe 3 who will move the Roe balance back to 6-3 or 7-2, and we’ll have another two decades of 1.3 million babies slaughtered every year.  That is 20M+ more dead babies, friends. McCain may mistakenly pick a judge, granted, but we can be sure that Obama won’t make 3 such mistakes.

So the challenge for the Obama supporter is that you have to establish how these issues can approach in ANY measure the importance of Abortion.

The War is a violation of the 6th Commandment? I don’t agree that the Bible teaches pacifism, but I will grant the point for the purposes of our discussion.

My answer: OK. Maybe it is. Lets count the dead. The War has killed 3000 american soldiers and 20000 enemy? That number of 6th Commandment violations is covered by 4 days of abortions in the US. The war dead in Iraq is not even a blip on the 6th Commandment screen in comparison to the abortion evil. (Don’t try to pin the terrorist killings of civilians in Iraq on us. That is an unjust attribution, and the Bible prohibits it.)

All the Christians I am talking about agree that abortion is murder. And yet — relatively speaking –very small numbers of Christians in history have believed that the death of combatants in a just war are prohibited by the 6th Commandment. And I imagine most Christians today would not claim that this current war is an unjust war.

What other issues are people attempting to compare to the quality of abortion when choosing a President? Race? Obama is better on race?

It is no doubt true that electing a Black President would help unify the country on matters of race. Surely it would be a step forward. But you have to ask yourself: Is the benefit worth the cost of millions of more dead babies?

The answer is simple: NO. ITS NOT WORTH THAT. I want racial integration. I want that bad. But not at that cost. I will take the live babies and figure out how to accomplish that in some other way.  (How about electing a Black pro-life President, for example).

Poverty?

I appreciate the importance of the issue and I agree that it must be a greater concern of ours. On this point I think  Americans are certainly the most generous private contributors to food relief for the poor and Christians have done some of the most important intellectual work on addressing this problem. No doubt we must care for the least of these.

But your point begs the question. Who exactly are the least of these in the US right now? The most vulnerable people in our country right are not the poor. The most vulnerable children in our country are 1.3M children in wombs who will make their way to abortion clinics this year. Hundreds in our own city. These are not vulnerable to lives in poverty, as bad as that is. They are vulnerable to death at the hands of their mothers, and homicides, protected by the full power of the State.  I would submit that we start caring for “the least of these” by first allowing them to live.

Again, I don’t think there is any real moral comparison to be made here, without a serious equivocation on the quality of the evil in American abortion.

CITY OF GOD AND CITY OF MAN

I want to address this point from MIKE: “To reflect on some of the assumptions in your post, you might run with different 20somethings than I run with, but the case of Obamamania somehow sweeping over and placing into a hypnotic trance young evangelicals who are otherwise astute and thoughtful, far overstates the case.  It’s more basic than that- the problem is that our options are so terribly limited because we live in the City of Man while longing for the City of God to come in its fullness.”

Well, I certainly agree with the despair over the City of Man v. City of God dichotomy. I don’t like it either. But I must say, a good number of these 20something Christians appear to be gushing over Obama, and when I ask them to identify any substance that motivates them, I get very little real response.

I wonder if Jeff’s “secret chord” point is not spot on: Many Xians appear to be attracted to Obama because of his charisma more than anything else. I hate to say it, but I just don’t see the sort of sober evaluation of him that is called for by a Christian understanding of human nature. Those on the right who reflexively support whatever Republican that comes along have the same question to answer, or course. But I am not addressing them at the moment.