http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb-the-wars-of-religion-return/

July 1, 2008
PJB: The Wars of Religion Return
posted by Linda
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Last week’s clash between Dr. James Dobson and Barack Obama is but the
latest skirmish in a war that dates back to the time of Christ. At
issue: What is Christian truth? Does the true Christian put social
peace ahead of his duty to make God’s Law man’s law?

In a speech in June 2006, Obama, citing the Book of Leviticus, which
declares homosexuality an abomination, noted that Leviticus also says
the eating of shellfish is an abomination and condones slavery.

Moreover, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is “a passage so radical that
it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its
application.”

“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” said Obama.

“Even … if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States …
whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with
James Dobson’s or with Al Sharpton’s?”

Barack was saying that, since Christians disagree deeply over what is
biblical truth, why fight? Let us “try to translate some of our
concerns in a universal language so that we can have an open and
vigorous debate rather than have religion divide us.”

In Catholicism, this is the heresy of indifferentism, which holds that
one religion is just as good as another and all religions can be a
path to salvation. The Pew poll out last week reveals that 82 percent
of Protestants believe there are multiple paths to salvation, as do 79
percent of Catholics and 57 percent of evangelicals.

A striking development. For did not Christ say, “I am the way and the
truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”?

Dr. Dobson is having none of it. Tuesday, he accused Obama of
“deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to
fit his own worldview, his own confused theology.”

“(H)e is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter,” said
Dobson. “Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the
political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to
the life of tiny babies?”

“What he (Obama) is saying here is that unless everyone agrees, we
have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson has no small point. For in his litany of moral heroes, Barack
himself selected no “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” Christians.

Indeed, Obama celebrates the Underground Railroad and the
abolitionists who, to end slavery, took us over the brink into Civil
War. He invokes the defiant marchers of Selma Bridge and Dr. King, who
chose confrontation and tore the nation asunder rather than see
segregation endure.

Obama, however, is now preaching a kumbaya Christianity where leaders
who believe abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn are to set
their convictions and cause aside in the name of ecumenical amity.

It is Dobson who, in his intolerance of perceived evil, seems in the
tradition of the abolitionists, and Barack who appears more like the
milquetoast believers of whom Christ said he would spit them out of
his mouth because they were neither hot nor cold and whom Dante
consigned to the deepest reaches of hell.

Does social peace require the toleration of manifest evil?

In the Roman Empire before Constantine, Christians accepted martyrdom
rather than burn incense to Caesar. Thomas More went to his death
rather than assent to the divorce of the Henry VIII, declaring, “I am
the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

A disciple of Gandhi, Dr. King is celebrated as a champion of civil
disobedience against the injustice of segregation. What would Obama
say to massive civil disobedience by those who believe the killing of
50 million unborn children since Roe v. Wade is a greater evil than
segregating folks by race in public accommodations?

Would an Obama, who hails the abolitionists and Dr. King, condemn them
as divisive? Was not that the charge thrown up at Dr. King?

The divide between Dobson and Barack is mirrored among many who
profess the Christian faith. It split the Baptists. It is splitting
the Episcopalians. A traditionalist minority has severed communion
over female bishops and homosexual marriages.

Barack has a “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution if he
thinks it requires us to give up fighting for justice because it may
be divisive, says Dobson. Here, too, he has a point.

The unbridgeable divide between the two portends a troubled future.
Can Americans ever come together if we are divided in our deepest
beliefs about morality and truth, where one side believes gay marriage
is moral progress, the other holds it a moral outrage; where one side
views abortion to be a mighty advance for women’s freedom, the other
sees it as legalization of mass slaughter of unborn babies?

There can be no peaceful coexistence in a cultural war because it is
at root a religious war. Far into the future, Americans seem fated to
face each other again and again “at some disputed barricade.”