"It’s Friday, October 14 2016. I’m Albert Mohler and this isThe Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
"RELIGIOUS BELIEFS HAVE TO CHANGE": HILLARY CLINTON'S OPEN HOSTILITY TOWARD RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
It seems that just about every day brings a new development and a new scandal in the 2016 American presidential election. Yesterday the scandal was the result of additional emails connected to the Clinton campaign released by the group WikiLeaks. As the Wall Street Journal said in its headline editorial what was represented was,
“Anti-Catholics for Clinton.”
But this is a bigger issue than just Hillary Clinton and her campaign and it’s a bigger issue than just Roman Catholicism or, in this case, anti-Roman Catholicism. What we see here is a bare-knuckled example of the secularist worldview that increasingly affects the American elites and shapes their thinking. And we now have here further documentation of the secular worldview and the hostility to religious conviction that increasingly marks the modern Democratic Party.
The Washington Post moved at least two stories on the controversy yesterday. The first is by Sarah Pulliam Bailey, she wrote,
“The latest batch of documents published by WikiLeaks appears to show Hillary Clinton’s campaign communications director joking with a confidant about Catholics and evangelicals in emails sent to John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s campaign.”
Now what’s really crucial at this point is understanding that this was not just some supporter of Hillary Clinton, we’re talking about the woman who is the Communications Director of the campaign, and these were emails sent to and responded about by John Podesta, the very Chairman of the Clinton presidential campaign. As Bailey reports, at the center of this controversy is Jennifer Palmieri, who is the campaign Communications Director for the Hillary Clinton campaign. She was also previously head of communications for the liberal think tank The Center for American Progress that, not coincidentally, John Podesta, the campaign chairman of the Clinton campaign, once ran. And the controversy concerns emails Palmieri received from a colleague at that liberal think tank, a man by the name of John Halpin. Halpin wrote,
“Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the [Supreme Court] and think tanks to the media and social groups.”
He went on to accuse the conservative leaders of corrupting the Catholic faith.
“They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”
Now the only way that kind of e-mail makes sense is if it is intended or expected that the writer will be understood by the recipient. And in this case there’s plenty of evidence that that was exactly what should have been assumed, and it appears that Jennifer Palmieri basically agreed with the assessment of John Halpin that what we’re looking at is conservative leaders that are on the one hand influenced by Catholicism and on the other hand influenced by evangelicalism. And what you find when you get to the bottom of the scandal is a sneering and condescending dismissal of conviction in politics and in particular of theological conviction, in the case of this scandal of both Roman Catholic and evangelical conviction. And what’s also known just in what’s already been cited is the dismissal, the rejection, the antipathy towards the historic teachings of the Christian church concerning sexuality and gender. That stands at the very center of what is here so openly hated.
In an interesting twist, Palmieri herself responded that she believes many conservative leaders are Catholic because they think it’s,
“The most socially acceptable politically conservative religion.”
She went on to say,
“Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”
The Post reported that John Podesta was included in that email thread, but did not respond to these specific emails. It is interesting here that Palmieri, the Communications Director for the Clinton campaign, says that many of these conservative political leaders are Roman Catholics because it would be socially embarrassing for them to be evangelical Christians. That demonstrates something of the class consciousness and the open antipathy to evangelical Christianity that permeates so many secular ranks, and in this case is demonstrated by high officials in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But the scandal continued to expand when additional emails leaked indicated that the Clinton campaign may well have been involved in trying to sponsor and organize groups within Catholicism to bring about moral and theological change. As Bailey reports,
“Another email that was released appears to suggest that Clinton’s campaign set up Catholic groups to organize on issues such as contraception. Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress, wrote in a 2011 email to Podesta that there needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.”
Here you have an email thread eventually connected with the Clinton campaign that demonstrates that the campaign has a theological agenda, a worldview agenda, not merely a political agenda. And about this evangelical Christians should not be generally surprised. But it is interesting to see this kind of frank and candid language used by people about the political situation and of course by people who eventually became central to the Clinton campaign.
Also writing at the Post, Marc A. Thiessen took us back to 2015 and an event known as the Women in the World Summit when Hillary Clinton made what he called,
“A stunning declaration of war on religious Americans.”
You may remember that at that point, the then-former U.S. Secretary of State spoke of what she called,
“Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
Thiessen then writes,
“Religious beliefs have to be changed? This is perhaps the most radical statement against religious liberty ever uttered by someone seeking the presidency. It is also deeply revealing. Clinton believes that, as president, it is her job not to respect the views of religious conservatives but to force them to change their beliefs and bend to her radical agenda favoring taxpayer-funded abortion on demand.”
Thiessen then writes,
“The hostility to people of faith here is simply breathtaking. Apparently when Clinton aides speak in private, their basket of ‘deplorables’ includes faithful Catholics and evangelicals who believe in the sanctity of human life. If they had made such comments about any other group, they would be politically excommunicated.”
Similar analysis of this particular development was clear in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article, “Anti-Catholics for Clinton” in which the editors of the Journal wrote,
“It’s no secret that progressive elites despise religion, but it’s still striking to see their contempt expressed so bluntly as in the leaked email chains that include Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.”
As the editors evaluate,
“This is a window into the intolerant secular soul of the Democratic establishment and perhaps explains why it has done so little to accommodate requests for religious liberty from the Little Sisters of the Poor. Team Clinton apparently views religion merely as a justification people adopt for their views on politics and gender.”
Sadly, it is likely that this scandal, an issue central to it, will be soon brushed aside by even new and more scandalous developments, but this is not an issue or a development that thinking Christians should fail to recognize as what it represents. It represents yet another example of the sneering and dismissive condescension of the secular elites. It also, however, demonstrates something more fundamental. And that is the divide between Christian and secular Americans is growing so deep that secularists now see Christianity as a truth claim as something that has to be overcome in the name of human progress, but they also see Christians as driven by a worldview they find not only beyond their understanding, but outright reprehensible.
Now this development at the end of the week makes even more important an insight that appeared in an article published in recent days at the New York Times written by Molly Worthen. The title of this article, “What’s God got to do with it?” And it too is in its own way about the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. But it is taking a very different tact. In this case Molly Worthen, a veteran observer and scholar of American religion, is writing about the fact that the Democratic left is increasingly divided between an older leadership that has some ties to historic Christianity and a new, invigorated, far more secular leadership. She looks at this, for example, in the distinction between the historic leadership of the Civil Rights movement deeply indebted to and grounded in Christianity and the Black Lives Matter movement that is explicitly secular and often absolutely dismissive even of the Christianity of the Civil Rights leaders of the past.
Worthen says that this just might explain why Hillary Clinton has been unable to use theological or religious arguments even coming from the left as a way of uniting her party. It’s because so much of her party has actually departed any identification with Christianity at all. Keep the scandal that developed just yesterday in mind as you read Molly Worthen writing days before when she says that the clash in the Democratic Party,
“…goes deeper than policy or strategy. It is a theological rift: Is religion founded in submission to unchanging principles or is it a protean revolutionary force, a tool of self-empowerment?”
Now before moving even an inch from that statement we need to pause and understand that what Molly Worthen is writing about in the New York Times is what we daily talk about, and that is the fact that worldview is essential to our understanding of everything and, in this case, it is two divergent worldviews, not just between the two political parties, but in this case within the Democratic Party, that should have our attention. Molly Worthen is noticing that there is a decided shift, perhaps even a generational shift, in the Democratic Party towards a far more secular worldview, one that really isn’t influenced at all by historic Christianity, but rather they see religion as a political force and perhaps as a matter of mere self-expression.
In the most interesting section of Molly Worthen’s article, she makes very clear that in the divergent worldviews within the Democratic Party, it comes down to a basic theological distinction—it is a distinction between the older leadership that is rather committed to a theological liberalism and a younger or newer leadership that isn’t committed to any theological worldview at all, or that measures every theological question by its political result. Writing about the Democratic activists she says,
“To many activists then and now, the test of theology is not Scripture, church tradition or scholarly consensus, but whether it empowers the oppressed. If it does, then it is true.”
In the end what this tells us is that the Democratic Party is trending in an even more secular direction and that secular direction might come with some kind of theology. But it is going to be a theology that is entirely rooted in political argument, not in Scripture, not in the tradition of the Christian church. That’s a very important insight, and that insight appeared in the New York Times days before the scandal broke concerning the emails within the Hillary Clinton campaign. For thoughtful Christians trying to think about this in terms of Christian biblical worldview analysis, perhaps the most important issue is the warning that all of this represents about the challenges we are likely soon to face. There is a hostility in these communications, a hostility to biblical traditional Christianity that simply cannot be ignored."
Source: Albert Mohler http://www.albertmohler.com/2016/10/14/briefing-10-14-16/
Ingen kommentarer:
Send en kommentar