@Walter Hinteler,
Walter Hinteler wrote:
Easter opinion in the NYT:
Most white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as anything but a Republican.
Democrats Are Christians, Too
This is why there is the old saying that
opinions are like arseholes...
This one is particularly ridiculous, but it's her
opinion
It's an opinion that is also highly insulting to "most white evangelicals" (whoever they are), but what else is new when it comes to Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times?
I suppose Ms. Sullivan feels she is fighting fire with fire by questioning the faith of self-identified Christians who support Trump or even vote Republican. I don't have any skin in the game from the standpoint of religious affiliation, but I find it problematic when anyone's faith is questioned because of politics. I certainly get the feeling Ms. Sullivan agrees with me on this and yet she apparently decided to jump into the mud puddle with both feet. How
Christian of her.
I don't know if Obama is a Christian or not. I suspect he is not, but I cared about the question just a little bit less than I cared about whether or not he was born in America. However, because a skilled and eloquent orator "...spoke about the nature of
his faith in some of the most
explicitly Christian terms publicly used by any president." is proof of exactly
nothing about the sincerity and depth of his faith.
I don't know or even suggest that it is the case with Obama, but it is more than possible for a man who says all the
right words and, by all indications, has been a faithful husband, to not actually believe the fundamental tenets of a religion he has adopted in public for political reasons. At the same time, it is also more than possible for another man to not even know the right words to say; to be a habitual adulterer, and to sincerely believe there is a God, that his son died on a cross to save his soul, and to recognize his philandering as sin requiring repenting. As I understand the religion, the Christian god will forgive all sins of a repentant
believer, but you're pretty much
****-out-of-luck if you don't believe there is a god whose forgiveness you need to ask.
This is not to argue that Obama is not a
true Christian and Trump is
or even that
being one is indicative of higher moral character. No one can see into the minds of anyone, let alone Presidents Trump or Obama, so while we can have opinions about their faith based on the signs in which we choose to place importance, using those opinions as political weapons is, in my
opinion, baseless.
