I just finished listening to James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” radio broadcast of June 24 and to the speech by Sen. Barack Obama that occasioned it. I know it’s not what he intended, but I would like to thank Dobson for calling my attention to one of the most remarkable pieces of oratory in recent American political history.
I don’t know whether Obama was already harboring ambitions for the White House back on June 28, 2006. But if he was, he couldn’t have had a better audition.
The speech was delivered to a Washington conference of a “progressive” Christian religious group, Call to Renewal. Obama’s tone was that of one “progressive” Christian believer giving hardheaded advice to like-minded others.
What was most notable in the speech was the careful listening on the part of the speaker that it reflected. He quite evidently had paid close attention to the sound and fury of America’s culture wars, to the clash of ardent religionists with ardent secularists, and managed to discern the meaning amid the noise.
Dobson called attention to the speech Tuesday because, he said, he had only recently become aware of it and of the fact that “I show up in that speech.”
He showed up in a single reference in which Obama, describing the welter of different religious beliefs in pluralistic America, observed that even if you left out of account all the non-Christians and those who believe in no God, there would still be no unity, because the question then would be whose Christianity should prevail. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”
Dobson tried to inflate that modest mention into a personal attack on him by Obama — or as one of his interlocutors on the broadcast put it, an attempt “to diminish you.” And even as he called attention to the fact that he is not a minister while Sharpton is, he poached on ministers’ territory, admonishing Obama for “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology.” Note the article “the,” reflecting Dobson’s highly dubious conviction that there is just one “traditional understanding.”
The confusion really is on Dobson’s part, and that of all who expect their favorite policy prescriptions to become the law of the land because they are convinced — whether from a reading of the Bible or some revelation directly from God’s lips to their ears — that that prescription is God’s will.
“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values … ” Obama said, “[It] requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.”
Calling that a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution, Dobson asserted that Obama had declared it “anti-democratic to believe or fight for moral principles in the Bible” that are not supported by a popular majority.
Actually he’s got it backward. What our Constitution promises is that every individual or group will have a chance by persuasion to turn itself into a majority — 50 percent plus one in some cases; larger majorities in other cases.
What Obama said was that in a pluralistic America, religious believers cannot reasonably expect to create majorities for their favorite policy prescriptions — “moral principles” in Dobson’s terms — unless they couch their arguments in terms that can be understood and appreciated by and persuasive to people other than believers.
There’s nothing complicated about that — unless your purpose is not to understand but to play politics.
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Don Wycliff is a former Tribune public editor. He teaches journalism at the University of Notre Dame.
