Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Culture Wars

A Bitter Pill

by Clay Staggs

I guess everyone has heard by now the quote from Barack Obama during his recent fundraiser in San Francisco. But, for the benefit of those who may have been cut off from civilization the past week, here it is:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…;And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The condescension is utterly mind-boggling. And it hasn’t taken HRC long to respond. Here’s a recent ad of hers from Pennsylvania:

Now, the politics of this are pretty obvious: Obama’s image as the candidate of Hope and Unity is getting a little tarnished. Hillary is trying to take advantage to save her candidacy (though her attempts to portray herself as a bible-toting sportsman ring a bit hollow). I suspect that Obama has just handed HRC a LARGE victory in PA and IN, and maybe NC too. This will also surely make the superdelegates think twice about his ability to carry states like PA, OH, and MI, which the Dem nominee MUST carry to win.

However, all that said, what’s most interesting to me about this is the worldview that BHO has with regard to Christianity. Every reference I have ever heard him make to what drew him to his church are all vaguely political. Almost invariably, they center around the social outreach programs (what we’d call mercy ministries) that the church had. I have yet to hear him mention his own salvation, or, much less, the name of Jesus.

So, it seems that Obama thinks that big city churches that engage in social projects are OK, but people in small towns who “cling” to their religion are just doing so out of bitterness at being out of work. Got that? No, I don’t either. There’s an obvious double standard, and I suspect that the real truth of it lies in how much a church centers on sin, redemption, and Christ. Those that actually mention those things (like in those small PA towns) can’t actually be drawing people to hear that stuff. They MUST have other motives. The must just be all exercised about their bank balance being too low (these small town folks don’t have Ivy League law degrees after all - else why on earth would they be in a small town?). It’s their poverty that makes them need Jesus. Urban churches with educated congregations don’t go in for all that stuff because they’re more sophisticated. They occupy themselves with nobler pursuits - like social outreach.

(For clarity’s sake, I’m NOT slamming social outreach. But, it’s not the reason for church.)

I think that Obama has a typical elitist attitude toward Christianity: it’s OK, so long as it knows its place and stays in it. And that place can’t intrude on anyone’s personal choices for living their life, or, worse, on public policy. But that’s not real Christianity. Christianity is knowing your sin and how Christ redeemed you from it without you even deserving it in the least. How can that knowledge stay contained? As I’ve written before, real Christianity is going to take over the whole person, and not be kept in a nice compartmentalized box where it merely runs a food bank or a clothes closet. A robust Christianity is going to assert itself beyond that, into the political, into the personal, into education and childrearing, into everything. For believing people, that’s a wonderful truth. For the unbeliever, it’s frightening.

That’s how I see it, anyway. But maybe I’m just bitter about being in this small town…….