Posts on Tom Minnery

Via Good as You we find out that the National Organization for Marriage has launched a petition drive to thank the Mormon Church for its deep involvement in the passage of Prop 8 and to declare solidarity with them:

We write firstly to express our deep gratitude to you and the entire LDS community for the large and impressive contributions of your church and its members in protecting marriage in California and Arizona.

Anyone who participated in this process has come to admire the competence, diligence and moral courage that so many members of your faith community displayed as part of this coalition effort—as Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, and people of other faith communities all came together to fight this great battle for marriage.

But we write for an even more important purpose: to express our outrage at the vile and indecent attacks directed specifically and uniquely at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members because of your courage in standing up for marriage.

The best thing about this is the name they have chosen for their new effort - Above the Hate.com.  Its name is especially ironic considering the list of those who rushed to add their signatures to the letter:

Maggie Gallagher

Donald E. Wildmon

James C. Dobson, Ph.D.

Charles W. Colson

Tony Perkins

Paul Weyrich

Dr. Gary Bauer

Bishop Harry Jackson

Richard Land

Tom Minnery

Ron Prentice

John Stemberger

Phil Burress

Kelly Shackelford

Regina Griggs

Wendy Wright

Janice Crouse, PhD

That's right - the leaders of the professional anti-gay lobby are "rising above the hate" to thank the Mormon Church for helping them deny gays and lesbians their basic equality.

I had been working on this post throughout the day, but before I actually got around to writing it I found that David Waters of the Post's "On Faith" blog had already pretty much written it, so I figure I'll just link to that and highlight this bit:

Officials at James Dobson's Focus on the Family seem to agree. They chose to focus on the success of Tuesday's anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in Arizona, California and Florida. "A tremendous night for the cause of righteousness," senior vice president Tom Minnery said on Focus's CitizenLink webcast.

Southern Baptist leader Richard Land told Christianity Today that "Evangelicals did their part. The exit polling is showing that there's no drop-off among evangelicals. The 2006 elections showed us that evangelicals can't win elections by themselves. If indeed the three marriage initiatives win, it will show that the values voters were not the ones who lost this election. If evangelicals are sad about the election, I'm going to say, 'Do you have faith in God? Is your faith in God or in government?'"

Focus on the Family's Tom Minnery has been, not surprisingly, unimpressed with the Democratic Party's religious outreach efforts, complaining primarily that they haven't asked people like him to be involved and saying that the party "wants the voters, but not the values" of the so-called "Values Voters" he claims to represent.

So the fact that he voiced those same criticisms in an interview with Christianity Today did not comes as much of a shock. But it is interesting that, even at this late date, many on the Right still can't seem to make up their minds regarding how they feel about John McCain, revealing once again that his choice of running-mate will make-or-break his campaign:

What objections do evangelicals raise about him as a candidate?

He's inconsistent on the abortion issue, given his view of the stem-cell research side of it. He has caused great mischief for a lot of organizations including our own who try to do issue advertising to let people know how the politicians stand during the election. We can't do that because of McCain-Feingold. Finally, the Supreme Court knocked that part of it out, but there's an increasing number of regulations that we have to deal with, so we don't appreciate that. I think that his joining the gang of 14 to take control over the Supreme Court justices was ineffective. Obviously we'd like a candidate that supports the Federal Marriage Amendment ... It's been difficult for [Dr. Dobson]. The selection of a vice president will be significant.

There are rumors that he could choose a pro-choice candidate.

I don't think he will. I hope he will not be that dumb. He's the candidate who's trying to appeal to moderates and independents. He needs somebody on the ticket who would appeal to conservatives. It'll be interesting if it's Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney seems to be a genuine convert on the marriage issue, on the abortion issue, although there are a small number of evangelicals who really despise him. Mitt Romney's statements from his own campaign against Ted Kennedy for U.S. Senate in which each vied to be more liberal, those things still reverberate.

Minnery was then asked whether Romney's Mormon faith would be a liability with the Right, to which he responded that it probably wouldn't be much of a problem because they realize that he "probably won't turn his office in the White House into a Mormon temple."  But then again, McCain's "age is a factor" and they might be uncomfortable with the prospect of having a Mormon president down the line:

There's a concern, sure. I think that would dampen some enthusiasm. I think evangelical voters are sophisticated enough to know that Mitt Romney did not seem to turn the state house in Boston into a Mormon temple and he probably won't turn his office in the White House into a Mormon temple. Republicans tend to give the next nomination to the guy who's waiting. Secondly, McCain's age is a factor ... although his mother's in her 90s.

Ezra Klein predicts that John McCain will choose Joe Lieberman as his running mate and explains his reasoning:

For the Republicans, however, 2008 can't be [about] mobilization. Their half is too small. Their brand is too damaged. And they recognized that when they chose John McCain -- who's not a base mobilizing evangelical conservative anyway -- as their nominee … [Lieberman] lets McCain telegraph an ideological ambiguity and shift towards a policy agenda that's about process, about "reaching across party lines and getting things done," rather than about sops to the conservative base.

That may very well be true, but for this strategy to work one has to assume that the McCain camp would be willing to sacrifice nearly the entire Religious Right base in an effort to win support of moderates and independents because, as the Right has made abundantly clear, their now tepid support for McCain hinges almost entirely on his choice of running mate.  

Just last week, we were noting how the Right was nearly unanimous in their opposition to Lieberman and that, while they were just starting to warm up to McCain, their efforts at mobilizing their grassroots activists on his behalf came to a screeching halt when he suggested that he was open to the idea of naming a pro-choice running mate.  

Right-wing activists have been battling one another over whom best fills the McCain campaign’s need to appease the base for weeks now, a battle that continues even to this day:

Among those doing some soul-searching this week is Betty Kanavel, who lives in the tiny Monroe County town of Ida and will vote for no one who isn't anti-abortion. She would like McCain to pick Mike Huckabee, the charismatic preacher and former Arkansas governor who finished third in Michigan's primary.

The 56-year-old Kanavel, who works part-time at her church, also is concerned over Romney's religion.

"I probably shouldn't go there, but I will anyway: The Mormon religion is totally not the Bible," Kanavel said, adding: "It's very hard, but if he's the choice, OK. He is a good man."

But this is a debate that has raged over Mike Huckabee vs. Mitt Romney and is rooted in the fact that both are, at least nominally, pro-life.  Lieberman, for all his faults, is ostensibly pro-choice - a fact that will not be easily glossed over by the Religious Right: 

Let us be clear on this. Our values and our respect for the Constitution make clear that women must have the right to choose—and we will continue to fight for that right

When McCain floated the idea of a pro-choice running mate a few weeks ago, the Right went completely off the rails and leaders like Richard Land have been taking every opportunity to make absolutely clear just what such a decision would mean to McCain's campaign: 

If he picks a pro-life running mate, it will really cement evangelical support. If he picks a pro-choice running mate it will give oxygen to all those doubts, and deflate the momentum that has been building.

As James Dobson explained last month when he announced that he was changing his position from “never” to “maybe” on McCain, his support hinged in large part on McCain’s choice of running mate:

I don't even know who his vice-presidential candidate will be. You know he could very well choose a pro-abortion candidate and it would not be unlike him to do that because he seems to enjoy a frustrating conservatives on occasions. But as of this moment, I have to take into account the fact that Senator John McCain has voted pro-life

consistently and that's a fact.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, FOF’s Tom Minnery recently told the San Francisco Chronicle that Dobson is essentially waiting to see who McCain picks before officially endorsing him:

"Admittedly, for a lot of us, McCain is an acquired taste," said Tom Minnery, who leads the government and public policy division for Focus on the Family.

But if McCain chooses a strong social conservative for his running mate, Focus on the Family's leader, James Dobson - whose conservative radio broadcasts are heard by 200 million people worldwide - could endorse him.

"We'll wait to see who his vice president is before embracing him," Minnery said.

If the McCain campaign decides that a pro-choice running mate is what the campaign needs, it’ll be because it has concluded that he can with without the Right or, more likely, that the Right will put aside its principles because they have no alternative but to support the campaign regardless of his running mate.  But the Right is in no mood to be insulted in this manner.  As it stands now, McCain’s support from the right-wing base is tenuous at best and will likely collapse completely were he to fill out his ticket with a pro-choice candidate.

As Dobson explained it, McCain has a history of going “out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes” of the Religious Right – and choosing a pro-choice running mate would be the ultimate poke in the eye to the Right; one that would make it nearly impossible for them to support him.

After years of monitoring the Religious Right, I tend to shrug when I see things like this from Focus on the Family announcing that they are offering “an online video series to keep you up to date on the election” because, frankly, I know what they are going to say:  Republican=good, Democrat=bad. 

And this inaugural video turned out to be exactly as predicted, with Stuart “Pray for Rain” Shepard discussing recent developments in the presidential race with FOF Vice President Tom Minnery.  Minnery beamed about the recent Saddleback faith forum hosted by Rick Warren, noting with delight that for all of Warren’s talk about how he was going to “lead these Neanderthal conservatives into the light of liberal Christianity” by expanding the evangelical agenda to include issues like climate change and poverty, he didn’t actually ask about those issues during the forum, instead focusing on core right-wing issues like marriage and abortion.  Minnery then discussed the need for McCain to pick a pro-life running mate and speculated that “gay activist groups” have greatly increased their influence within the Democratic Party.  It is all pretty standard right-wing fare.

But then the discussion turns to the topic of why the Democrats chose Denver, CO to host this year’s convention and it gets weird.  After Minnery makes some comments about Democrats seeking to be competitive in the Western US, Shepard asks about (seemingly false) reports that efforts are underway in the city to rid the downtown area of the homeless before the start of the convention, at which point Minnery goes off the rails, likening it to Communist China and expressing disbelief that there are still homeless people in Denver, thus apparently proving that Democrats can’t govern:

Shepard: Tom, people have been sending me news clippings about the convention offering special offers for homeless people to try and get them out of the downtown area, either out to a park or to a movie or something.  I just read recently they’re offering free haircuts to street people.  When you hear those stories, what do you think they illustrate?

Minnery:  They remind me of Communist China.  That’s exactly what we have been seeing in the run-up to the Olympics. Let’s make it look good.  Let’s not solve the problems, let’s just push the problems ordinary people are having out of the way. It’s been a Democrat city for a long time; the local government has been in the control of the Democrat Party, yet there are still homeless people in and around Denver.  And so that just shows that that party has not been able to solve this problem.  The homeless are still with us.

If there is one thing Religious Right activists apparently can’t stand, it’s forums on the role of faith in public life that they don’t control.  As we noted earlier this week, Tony Perkins, Mike Huckabee, and Lou Engle are set to hold a press conference on Friday timed to coincide with joint appearance by Barack Obama and John McCain at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church where they are set to “discuss faith in public life, AIDS, the environment and other issues.”

Now, other Religious Right activists have announced that they are having their own conference call with reporters following the event on Saturday in order to provide the media with “an expanded perspective on how evangelicals see the relationship between faith and public policy” – by which they mean the right-wing perspective:   

Some of the nation's top evangelical leaders – Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family; Bishop Harry Jackson, Senior pastor, Hope Christian Church and Chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition; Janet Folger, President and Founder of Faith2Action and national radio host; Phil Burress, President of Citizens for Community Values, among others.

Martha Zoller, Talk Radio World Today Host will be the moderator.

WHAT: Press Conference Call to gauge reaction of conservatives and evangelicals to the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, moderated by Pastor Rick Warren. The Forum takes place on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008 and features Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill.

WHEN: Press teleconference call takes place at 10:30 EDT/7:30 PDT by calling: Toll-free: 1-888-296-6828. Passcode is: 418647# (announce name and media organization). If you would like to receive speaker bios, transcripts and/or audio versions of the interviews, please email Debbie@NewsGuests.com.

INFO: This press call event provides an opportunity for an informed response to the event at Saddleback Church, thus providing an expanded perspective on how evangelicals see the relationship between faith and public policy. The press conference call will give reporters access to alternative views on each candidate's presentation at the Saddleback Forum.

The conventional wisdom is that Bob Barr’s third-party presidential bid probably won’t have much of an impact on the election or siphon off too many potential supporters of John McCain, but that doesn’t mean that Barr isn’t trying.  

Last month he penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking McCain on the issue of judicial nominations, the one area where McCain has been making inroads with the Right, laying out the case that "Judges Are No Reason to Vote for McCain." And now the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that he has gone straight for the jugular, travelling to Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs:

Buried in a press release for Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for president, was a mention that on Monday, Barr toured the offices of Focus on the Family, headed by James Dobson — a significant voice among evangelical Christians.

…

Barr campaign manager Russell Verney said today that Barr did not meet with Dobson, who was recovering from surgery. But Barr did meet with Tom Minnery, senior vice president for Focus on the Family, and others.

Barr, Verney said, “had a great meeting and discussion with them."

Of course, given that Barr espouses some views that are directly at odds with Dobson’s political agenda, it is unlikely that Dobson will ever throw his support his way. But considering that Dobson can’t seem to make up his mind about McCain, it can’t help McCain’s chances to have Barr hanging around FOF headquarters and meeting with Dobson’s right-hand man.

Last night, Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery and Stuart Shepard took time out from their busy schedules attacking Barack Obama’s faith and praying for "rain of biblical proportions" to ruin his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention to sit down for a webcast with Bishop Harry Jackson, himself taking a break from running his bogus grassroots energy front group to discuss the upcoming election.

Jackson explained that it is vitally important for "values voters" to get active before November because "an anti-church sentiment is aligning against us" and that an on-going "march of darkness" will overtake the country if "we don’t do the right thing in this campaign":

After James Dobson’s decision to launch an ill-tempered and tendentious attack on Barack Obama’s faith (with follow-up broadcasts), the Focus on the Family founder couldn’t have been surprised to hear criticism—even from his own side. “If Christian conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to make serious arguments and speak with intellectual integrity,” wrote Peter Wehner of the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center. “In this instance, Dobson didn't. He has set back his cause and made some of us who are evangelicals and conservatives wince.”

But Dobson mustered an impressive showing of umbrage against a pro-Obama ad from a group called Matthew 25 Network. “You know it’s an election year when certain people start grabbing headlines by attacking the faith of presidential candidates,” the ad says. “With all these stones being cast at Senator Obama, it can be hard to know what to believe.” The ad then quotes Obama describing the power of faith, without discussing politics or particulars: “Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God’s spirit beckoning me.  I submitted myself to his will and dedicated myself to discovering his truth.”

Dobson, taking the ad to be directed at himself, responded with a segment at the beginning of his radio show yesterday.

DOBSON: For one thing, nobody is trying to grab headlines. Who needs ‘em? I get ‘em without even trying, even if I wanted them. And we are also not throwing stones at Senator Obama for his faith. That’s off the wall. We are responding to his comment about the Bible and about us and about the Constitution and that was the point of what we had to say.

TOM MINNERY: And it’s also true that the Bible has other things to say about how people speak, and the, the tongue, the tongue can be deceitful, and people don’t always speak the truth, and there’s some reasons to doubt what it is we’re about to hear.

According to Minnery, a vice-president at Focus, Obama’s description of his conversion is “deceitful” because the senator is “one left-wing liberal on the issue of abortion.” Furthermore, Minnery said “we have to question whether he’s even sincere as he speaks so lovingly about religion.”

Now, it may sound like Dobson and Minnery were once again directly denying the validity of their political opponent’s profession of Christianity. But Dobson, seconds later, took personal offense at such a notion:

DOBSON: Well we need to get to the program that we prepared for today, but we did want to make this statement, because we don’t want to leave it on the record that we’re throwing stones at Senator Obama to grab the headlines. That’s very offensive to me personally, and I’m sure it is to you as well.

MINNERY: And I appreciate your wanting to defend the evangelical beliefs in the Bible.

Focus on the Family has wrapped up its three-part series attacking Barack Obama’s faith and understanding of Christianity.  In part one, FOF Vice President Tom Minnery accused Obama of having “a fierce misunderstanding of Christianity,” while in part two he called Obama’s interpretation of the Bible sacrilegious.  In the final installment, Minnery said Obama has a “complete and utterly ridiculous understanding” of the role of religion in public life.  

Trobee: Tom, in the next segment of the address, I think it really represents the crux of the issue. What he says, basically, is that Christians are being asked to set aside their values and basically to keep their noses out of politics.

Obama: Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do.

Minnery: Oh oh

Obama: But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise.

Minnery: In a way, he’s right. What we believe, we believe absolutely. But no one who understands the proper place of religion in a free society believes that God’s edicts ought to be imposed on everyone. Nobody can impose anything on anyone. We understand compromise. We believe that it is unrighteous, wrong, to take the lives of innocent unborn children but we want to fight for those beliefs in the Democratic halls of the legislatures of the Congress. We are able to work back to our principle piece by piece, increment by increment, compromise by compromise, if you will. We are quite willing to be involved, as citizens, in the legislature that our civil government provides for us. We don’t want to impose any edict, any religious principle of God.

Obama: If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Minnery: What he is suggesting here is that somehow conservative Christian people, presumably Dr. Dobson, whom he mentioned by name, wants to impose a theocracy. There has never been a suggestion from here or in any orthodox, evangelical source that a theocracy is appropriate for the United States of America. A theocracy, God’s edicts, were what the Israelites had to contend with. That’s called the Old Testament. This is called the New Testament. Salvation is open to everyone. Our Christianity is based on love. Nobody can force anyone to love anyone else. So this is a complete and utterly ridiculous understanding of how we bring faith into the public square.

Focus on the Family continues with its attack on Barack Obama’s faith and understanding of Christianity, with FOF's Gary Schneeberger discussing it on Janet Folger's Faith 2 Action radio program while FOF Vice President Tom Minnery continues his three-part video criticism, claiming that Obama’s interpretation of the Bible is such a “sacrilege” that he “could cry”:

Trobee: Tom, [Obama] says he Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly when it comes to politics and yet, in the next clip, we’ll see what he really thinks about that.

Obama: Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.

Minnery: I could cry. I could cry. That’s a gross misunderstanding of Scripture. To compare the dietary laws that pertained to the Israelites with the New Testament, Kingdom of God theme of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is a grotesque mischaracterization of what we believe as a Christian people today. He is mixing the Levitical law which applied to the Israelites as they were coming out of 400 years of slavery in Egypt at a time when God chose them to be his holy people; he was purifying them, everything he said then applied to them. Jesus opened to everyone the benefit of Heaven. It’s a new era, the New Testament era, and to willingly mix all this up is, to me, a sacrilege.

Trobee: And it doesn’t stop there. Let’s watch this next one …

Minnery: I hate to even think what’s on this next one.

Obama: Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Minnery: Well, hello Senator. Isn’t it evident that taking of innocent human life is killing, is murder, whether someone believes in faith or whether someone does not believe in faith? Is this not evident to all? He hides behind what he believes is some false notion of religion and yet those notions of religion underlie much of our Western civilization’s law. For example, thou shalt not murder – that’s a religious concept. It comes in the Old Testament, it was affirmed in the New Testament, and it’s a law. Because it’s religious, should it be erased from law? Of course not. There are good reasons why this religious principle works well in secular, civil law for everybody regardless of whether they buy into the religious origin of that law. Thou shalt not steal is another religious precept that makes a pretty good law for everybody. He’s mixing things up here and I hope he’s mistaken, I hope he’s not willful, but I don’t know.

If any Religious Right commentators were still bashful in knocking Barack Obama’s Christianity, James Dobson’s decision to attack Barack Obama on theological grounds is like a permission slip for them to come out of the woodwork.

“When you enter into that conversation, you open your theology and your policies up to scrutiny,” claimed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “And that's what Dr. Dobson did.” Rick Scarborough—who is revamping his “Patriot Pastor” church rallies—said he “was appalled by the Senator's remarks … [T]he presumptive Democratic nominee is no friend of Bible-believing Christians.”

Mike Huckabee, who once came to the defense of Jeremiah Wright but now is working for both Fox News and John McCain, also joined the amen corner, accusing Obama of “reinterpret[ing]” religion and claiming that “what Barack Obama has done is to drive his campaign into a sink hole by saying some things regarding religion that I think will make people who are religious very uncomfortable.”

And Baptist Press, the media outlet of the Southern Baptist Convention, also promoted Dobson’s attack. BP’s executive editor Will Hall wrote that the senator “disrespected a portion of the Word of God simply because it does not fit his worldview” on the issue of homosexuality. “Obama's misappropriation of Scripture to fit his political perspective is more grave than its implications for a presidential election,” he added, calling the supposed scandal “biblical in proportion.”

Published next to the report on Dobson’s comments and Hall’s piling-on, Baptist Press also featured the words of Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s political spokesman:

"I think to go into the particular beliefs of a particular faith and to try to grill a candidate on that is an intrusion into his personal faith," Land said. "I think what we want to know in a campaign is how that person's faith impacts them.

Wait a minute—it sounds like Land is defending Obama and repudiating the “intrusion” of James Dobson! Indeed, Land said it was fine for candidates to talk about faith and their values, but that “they shouldn't either be asked to be or volunteer to be a spokesperson for their faith tradition, in other words talking about the particulars of their faith.”

Of course, there’s a catch: Land was speaking nearly three weeks before Dobson made his comments.

When Dobson attacked Land’s favored presidential candidate Fred Thompson—even saying he didn’t “think he’s a Christian”—Land called Dobson’s words “harsh and unwarranted.” Will Land hold Dobson to the “intrusion” standard this time?

And what about Obama’s statement that the U.S. is “no longer just a Christian nation,” which Dobson and his lieutenant also attacked? Land said at the above event that he “was, as a Baptist, somewhat appalled by John McCain’s assertion that the Constitution created America as a Christian nation.” Will he say he’s “appalled” by the Focus on the Family version?

Well, we’re not going to hold our breath. Land has been trying to rally the Right to John McCain, even as some complain about McCain’s faith talk. "I'd rather have a third-rate fireman than a first-class arsonist,” Land said recently of the two candidates.

After generating a wave of coverage with his nearly unprecedented attack on Barack Obama and his understanding of his own Christian faith in yesterday’s radio broadcast, James Dobson has returned to his standard program format for the time being with a program about “Recapturing the Joy.”  But that doesn’t mean that Focus on the Family is about to let the story go or about to back of its incessant attacks against Obama and his faith.  

Today, FOF unveiled the first installment of a three-part video series in which host Kim Trobee and Focus' Vice President of Public Policy Tom Minnery criticize Obama’s 2006 Call to Renewal Keynote Address.  In it, Minnery claims that Obama still has a long way to go in his “journey of faith” because he’s no where “close to our understanding of what the Christian faith is.” Minnery also gets unnecessarily worked-up about the fact that Obama sought to “compare James Dobson with Rev. Al Sharpton,” when, in fact, Obama wasn’t comparing them at all; he was contrasting them – a key distinction apparently lost on Minnery, Dobson, and the people at Focus on the Family:

Kim Trobee: Tom, Obama explains that he was not raised in a particularly religious household. He talks about his Dad being a Muslim and then becoming an atheist and he says that his mother grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion. What does that tell us with regard to his own views on religion?

Tom Minnery: It tells us that he’s on a journey of faith, and that’s a good thing because we think people out to journey toward faith. But from what he says about the Christian faith, who knows where he is? He’s not close to our understanding of what the Christian faith is, by any means.

Trobee: Let’s go ahead and show this first clip of the video.

Barack Obama: Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

Trobee: Is that true?

Minnery: No, it’s not true. It’s not even close. Senator, we are not an atheist nation. Senator, we are not a Hindu nation. We are not a Buddhist nation. 76% of the people, according to last year’s Pew Center on Religion survey, people identify themselves as Christian. Now, all of them are not practicing, yet 40% still go to church once a week and, by and large, it’s Christian denominations they’re going to. We are, along among the world, a nation still with a strong Judeo-Christian heritage and he is trying to erase that. And he does so at his own peril.

Trobee: In the next clip, he takes aim at Dr. Dobson and that’s something that, up until now, we were unaware had happened. Let’s take a look at it.

Obama: And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's?

Minnery: Wow. For someone on a journey of faith to compare James Dobson with Rev. Al Sharpton is breathtaking. Many viewers will know that Al Sharpton achieved his notoriety as a polarizing, racist figure in American life, a black racist figure. That’s strong language, but that is who he was and who he is and you can find numerous stories about his run-ins with racial incidents in the past, from the Tawana Brawley hoax to the Central Park jogger issue in which he entered the fracas on the side of black racism. And to compare that with Dr. James Dobson, a child psychologist – not even a Reverend – is a fierce misunderstanding of Christianity.

For months now, Religious Right activists have been quietly attacking Barack Obama’s Christian faith.  For years, the Right had routinely accused anyone who dared to criticize any Republican or right-wing political candidate for their political views of engaging in an unconstitutional religious test or exhibiting religious bigotry.

But the ascent of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, coupled with his open discussion of his personal faith, has forced the Right to not only jettison its long-held position that attacking a political candidate because of his or her faith was off limits, but to go a step further to include outright attacks on the fundamental tenets of Obama’s Christianity. 

For months, activists like Rob Schenck have been declaring “Obama's Christianity woefully deficient” and demanding that Obama explain, in detail, the basic tenets of his faith so that the Right can judge just “how profound is the religious commitment that Barack Obama has made.”  Others have echoed that point, saying that Obama is not a “true Christian,”  that “there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement,” and that Obama’s faith “tramples on the historic teachings of Christianity and the Bible.”

Until now, those attacks had been more or less relegated to the right-wing fringe, but it looks like they are about to become mainstream talking points, as James Dobson attacked Obama’s understanding of Christianity on today’s broadcast, as the Associated Press reported: 

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus' teachings in the New Testament.

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology," Dobson said.

"... He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

…

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the "lowest common denominator of morality," labeling it "a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution."

Listen to Dobson and Minnery discuss Obama and his faith: