Last week we highlighted President Bush’s recent interview with ABC News in which he stated that he didn’t believe, among other things, that the Bible was literally true and that his answers, not surprisingly, did not much impress Religious Right activists like Rob Schenck who saw it evidence of the “President’s eroded spiritual condition.”
To the list of those unimpressed with Bush’s theological views we can now add Richard Land, who asserts that Bush’s understanding is flat out wrong and says it’s a good thing that he’s merely the “commander-in-chief, not theologian-in-chief”:
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said that upon hearing Bush’s latest comments, he had the same reaction as to when Bush “has said similar things.”
“I am very grateful that we have a president who is a person of personal and deeply committed faith in Jesus Christ, but statements like these remind us that he is indeed commander-in-chief, not theologian-in-chief,” Land told Baptist Press. “I know the president, and he is a person of strong faith and has sort of a C.S. Lewis Basic Christianity kind of faith that is very deep and profound in his personal life, but he is not a theologian. In this particular instance, he is wrong. The Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is not Allah, and there are not many paths to God.”
You at least have to give the Right some credit for consistency – if your personal faith and understanding fails to meet their standards, they’ll let you know that you are ignorant and wrong.
Of course, there is a slight difference: when President Bush’s faith doesn’t meet the Religious Right’s standards, it is just chalked up to the fact that Bush is just kind of a bad Christian, whereas when Barack Obama fails to meet their standards, they take it as further evidence that his Christianity is entirely phony and that he has no right to even call himself a Christian.
