On the February 19 edition of MSNBC’s Tucker, host Tucker Carlson claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) faith has become “suddenly conspicuous” — suggesting that Obama has only recently begun addressing his religious background as part of “a very calculated plan on the part of the Democratic Party to win” religious voters in the 2008 presidential race. Later in the program, Jim Wallis, president and executive director of Sojourners/Call to Renewal, stated that he has known Obama for 10 years, saying that Obama is “not new to” speaking publicly about his faith and has “been doing it for a long time.” Carlson did not challenge Wallis’ statement.
As Media Matters for America noted, on the February 7 edition of Tucker, Carlson criticized Obama for belonging to a church Carlson claimed “sounds separatist to me” and “contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity,” a subject Carlson said he was “actually qualified to discuss.”
Obama has been speaking and writing about his faith for years. On Page 294 of his memoir Dreams From My Father (Three Rivers Press, 1995), Obama wrote:
And in that single note — hope! — I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shamed about, memories more accessible than those of ancient Egypt, memories that all people might study and cherish — and with which we could start to rebuild. And if part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us and would fulfill its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.
Tucker Carlson is a tool.