Joe McKeever

Preacher Lessons -- They Just Keep-a-Comin'!

Earlier this week, I got something off my chest about America's most controversial radio celebrity, Rush Limbaugh. Marty posted it on the website and it went out to our 1200 subscribers Wednesday night. I stayed home on Thursday to do my taxes and take care of a few tasks, and then turned on the computer Friday morning on entering the office. I had quite a surprise in store.

There were 18 comments at the end of that article (and more since) and almost that many bypassing the blog and coming directly to my e-mail. They were equally divided, in case you're wondering. Some could not believe I would be so naïve as to suggest that Rush Limbaugh has outlived his usefulness, some blamed my mental contamination on reading Newsweek (which I had referred to), and one said, "I know that you are a Democrat." (I replied that I've taken Newsweek ever since they made seminary students a good rate some 40 years ago -- it's a great magazine in a hundred ways--and that I'm a life-long Republican, although what that has to do with anything I'm not sure.)

Other writers chimed in with variations of "I agree" and "I'm glad you said it." One said, "Now that you're retiring, you can get these things off your chest!"

The editor of our state Baptist paper emailed that he wants to run that article. I replied, "Kelly, you're trying to get me hung in effigy!" He's tweaking the article a little (I don't know how yet), and then plans to run it. (I'm uncertain whether this is courage or foolhardiness on my part.)

Contributing comment number 19 at the end of that article, I suggested one more lesson in this business for preachers: don't mess with politics, pastor!

Similar lessons are found all around us, of course. I noticed a great one in this (Friday, March 13, 2009) morning's op-ed page of the Times-Picayune. Charles Krauthammer of the New York Times is commenting on President Obama's signing the bill last week to overturn the Bush administration's ban on stem cell research. Krauthammer had supported such research and now the White House was inviting him to attend President Obama's signing of the executive order which will allow federal funding for such.

Krauthammer turned down the invitation.

Interesting. And why did he do that? In his answer lies the lesson for every pastor. (Honestly, I don't know a pastor in a hundred who could have turned down such an invite to the White House for a cause he believes in.)

Turning the invitation down turns out to have been the smart thing to do.

Krauthammer says, "Once you show your face at these things, you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring."

Show up for the signing, get your picture made with the group around the desk in the Oval Office and you are thenceforth a member of their team. Whatever they do, whatever comes of this, whatever the president says, you were in on it and abetted it.

Some call that selling your soul. It's how ministers and others lose their right to speak truth to power.

Krauthammer goes on, "My caution was vindicated."

What happened, he writes, is that in his speech before signing the executive order, Obama took all restrictions off research using embryos. All restrictions off, every one. He leaves everything to the scientists.

Krauthammer says, "That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy." Another part of the ceremony, where Obama promised to restore "scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- well, that "would have made me walk out."

Now, Charles Krauthammer is no Baptist, not a Republican, and not a subscriber to many of the values I hold sacred. But, he did something fascinating. He stood up for George Bush. How he did so is fascinating.

When Obama promised to "restore scientific integrity," the implication is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was "driven by dogma, ideology, and politics."

"What an outrage," Charles Krauthammer says.

He explains, "George Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president."

"It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out."

On the other hand, "Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme." He explains, "It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men."

A straw man -- I interject for the benefit of Ginger -- is a rhetorical device in which the speaker imagines an opponent's position being simple and easily refuted. That is, he oversimplifies the objections to his point of view, then shoots down those objections (the straw men).

Want an example?

Krauthammer quotes Obama saying we must resist the "false choices between sound science and moral values." And yet, he writes, "exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the 'use of cloning for human reproduction.'"

Got that? Realize the implications of it? Krauthammer does.

He continues, "Does (Obama) not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it. Is he so obtuse not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science?"

He analyzes, "Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not. This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism and science in medical ethics."

Krauthammer says, "Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will 'restore science to its rightful place' and make science, not ideology, dispositve in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically 'scientific.'"

He concludes with this line from Dr. James Thomson, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells: "If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough."

I'm well aware in the process of making a point about pastors not compromising themselves by accepting the invitation to get "on the inside of power," we've veered into other matters. Perhaps there's a point for ministers of the Lord there, too.

Be careful about positioning yourself too strongly in opposition to the stance your predecessor took. The more you look into what he did and why he did it, you may find he was right. Or at least, not as dumb as you first thought.

The way I heard it, after Dr. J. D. Grey died, the next pastor of the First Baptist Church of New Orleans told the congregation in his opening message, "Now, I will not be running around the world trying to be God's spokesman on everything. I will stay at home and be your pastor."

That congregation had taken great pride in its pastor's being well-known and respected across the land. They interpreted the new pastor's comments as criticism of Dr. Grey, and he was off to a rocky start.

"Lead me in the path of righteousness, Lord." David's prayer from Psalm 23 has never been improved on.