April 2, 2013

Breaking: Politicizing Religious Worship Now a Bad Thing

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Apparently, during a sermon attended by President Obama yesterday, Rev. Luis León said this:

It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back … for blacks to be back in the back of the bus … for women to be back in the kitchen … for immigrants to be back on their side of the border. The message of Easter is about the power of love over loveless power.

OK, that’s probably not especially appropriate for an Easter sermon. At the same time, this is a little hard to take seriously:

“It’s sad when clergy egregiously politicize worship,” Mark Tooley, president of the conservative Christian organization Institute on Religion and Democracy, wrote in one of several blogs and articles that have criticized the sermon. “Is this characterization of religious conservatives as racists, chauvinists and bigots really fair and accurate? And if political critique of religious conservatives were appropriate in an Easter sermon, couldn’t León offer a thoughtful analysis rather than snide smugness?”

Is the religious right really now taking the position that religious worship shouldn’t be politicized? It’s a little late to start complaining about it now, isn’t it?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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