Ed Kilgore makes an important point about Barack’s speech.
(1) against conservative claims that God’s Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;
(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;
(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture.The political import of Obama’s speech is that he is engaging in an intra-Christian debate that is already undermining the Christian Right every day. In essence, the James Dobsons of the religious world have sought to lead their flocks into a prophetic stance that stakes their spiritual lives to a series of specific and highly questionable political commitments. More and more, even the most conservative evangelical Christians are chafing against this bondage, while the less conservative faithful, including the largely apolitical attendees of rapidly growing non-denominational megachurches, never bought into it much to begin with.
The real divide I noticed in reactions was between those on religious liberal blogs who found the argument quite refreshing because it was a complete reshaping of the modern debate over values and the clearest statement of that is above.
The notion that the speech reinforces GOP talking points is based on either not reading the speech or not understanding what they read. The speech redefines the values debate to not just be about sexual morality versus economic morality and argued clearly for liberal positions based on a personal understanding of faith.
Comparing it to triangulation by Bill Clinton fundamentally misunderstands the line Barack drew. He isn’t attacking liberals to provide a basis for being in the middle of liberals and Dobson, he’s attacking Dobson and Fawell from distinctly progressive stances.
He does say that
“Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats.”
One challenge to this earlier was whether the ACLU actually fights this and it’s rather complicated. If you think High School Democrats and Republicans should have the same access as the High School Muslims or Baptists, then the ACLU does disagree. High School political groups generally have faculty sponsors as do any student groups. The way the ACLU identifies the challenge is that faculty can only be present for monitoring which is different from political groups where faculty sponsors can be active and it’s certainly different from my high school where the teacher sponsor was active for the Bible Study. So the ACLU’s position might or might not be slightly different from Obama’s, but we do see such arguments of separation in schools and non-profit programs that from fairly well known progressive publications like the Nation. It’s true that most progressives probably aren’t absolutists, but discomfort with faith based arguments aren’t rare—take the response to Obama’s speech that largely missed the point in terms of what the speech argued.