If The First Words At The Inauguration Are "Love Is The Morning And The Evening Star," Run!

According to Wikipedia, Richard D. (Rick) Warren earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from California Baptist University in Riverside, his Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX, and his Doctor of Ministry degree from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. According to Warren, his call to full-time ministry came as a 19-year-old student at California Baptist when, in November 1973, Warren and a friend skipped out on classes and drove 350 miles to hear W(ally).A(mos). Criswell preach at the Jack Tar Hotel, in San Francisco. Rick Warren stood in line to shake hands with Criswell (pastor of First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas, TX) afterward.

“When my turn finally arrived, something unexpected happened. Criswell looked at me with kind, loving eyes and said, quite emphatically, “Young man, I feel led to lay hands on you and pray for you!” He placed his hands on my head and prayed: “Father, I ask that you give this young preacher a double portion of your Spirit. May the church he pastors grow to twice the size of the Dallas church. Bless him greatly, O Lord.”

Verily, Warren's (nondenominational) Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA (the most densely populated city in Orange County) is a megachurch with 22,000 worshipers at its Sunday services. In 2007, First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX was nowhere to be found (Saddleback Church was 4th.) in the 100 Largest U.S. Churches (Outreach Magazine, 2007). Ol' Criswell was passing the torch of evangelism and didn't even know it at the time. Or, if one accepts Warren's porpoise-driven account, the old fella with white hair and his standard white suit was divinely inspired. If the Saddlebags preacher shows up at the inauguration in a white suit channeling Elmer Gantry about love bein' a mornin' and an evenin' star, verily run — don't walk — for the nearest exit. If this is (fair & balanced) impiety, so be it.

[x Huffington Post]
"We Call on You Lord": Leaked Rick Warren Invocation
By Linda Hirschman

(NOTE: Copies of what seemed to be a draft of an inaugural invocation by Pastor Rick Warren arrived in the fax machines of several prominent journalists this morning. This site does not vouch for the authenticity of the draft, although each of the statements does conform to material in Pastor Warren's speeches, interviews, or on his websites.)

O Lord, as we come together on this historic and solemn occasion to inaugurate a president and vice president. We pray, O Lord, for President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph Biden, to whom You have entrusted leadership of this nation at this moment in history.

We pray for their advisors and supporters, particularly their Jewish advisors and supporters, who will surely roast in hell if they do not abandon their refusal to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior. Pray for the conversion of Obama chief advisor David Axelrod and his economic wise man Larry Summers, his early supporters Lester Crown and his campaign finance chair Penny Pritzker, for, as the Bible says, there will be a day when there will be a great revival of faith in God through Jesus among the Jewish people. (Romans 11). Obviously, this is a day that we, as believers in Christ, want to pray for! Let the light of Christian salvation come to the Jewish Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel and his family, some of whom survived the German effort to bring them to Christian truth in the last generation.

May all efforts to stop homosexuals from violating the ancient humanitarian institution of marriage succeed as did your will in California in the last election. Attend particularly, O lord, to President Obama's environmental chief Nancy Sutley, and to the man who has worked essentially without sleep for three months to save the American economy from total collapse, Representative Barney Frank. Use the government to bring an end to acts as bad as incest, pedophilia and polygamy, by stamping out homosexuality among the homosexuals, a people evolutionarily unfit, that we may truly become one nation before God. May the First Amendment to the Constitution protect all who want to compare homosexual sex to incest, pedophilia and polygamy from the arrows of hate speech accusations shot by the politically correct.

Change the hearts of the new administration's pro-choice advisors and supporters, including the Justices of the Supreme Court who stand here today with us: Holocaust denier Anthony Kennedy, holocaust denier Ruth Bader Ginzburg, holocaust denier David Souter, holocaust denier Stephen Breyer, and holocaust denier John Paul Stevens, who is about to swear in the Vice-President, in that abortion is a holocaust and the eighteen million or so women who have committed abortion in the thirty-five years since 1973 are thus no better than Nazis.

Bless the women, who have chosen to follow their ambitions into public life, but change the hearts, Lord, of Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis from independent lives of their own to submission to their husbands, if any, for I love the King James Version's rendition of Ephesians 5:22 "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands" and of course "Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ if God." 1 Corinthians 11:3. These women have chosen to participate in the public life of the community. Enlighten them as to the requirement that women not speak in church, saving any questions they have about their common life to ask their husbands as they return home.

Now, O Lord, despite the plain language of the Constitution that created this great nation, we dedicate this presidential inaugural ceremony to You. May this be the beginning of a new dawn for America as we humble ourselves before You and acknowledge You alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[After college (Cornell University, B.A. with honors) and law school (University of Chicago, J.D.), Linda Hirschman practiced labor law for fifteen years. By 1988, Hirschman decided to move on to teaching and went back to get a PhD in philosophy, while she taught. After receiving a Ph.D. (University of Illinois at Chicago) in 1994, she accepted appointment to the Allen/Berenson Chair in Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. In 2002, Hirschman "took a vow of poverty" and became a freelance writer. Hirschman has written two books: Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex with legal historian Jane Larson (1998) and A Woman’s Guide to Law School (1999), as well as many articles, scholarly and popular.]

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Roll Over, Robert Ingersoll! Here Comes Hitchens!

[x YouTube/Anachronistics Channel]
"Elmer Gantry" (1960) - "On My Way To Canaan's Land" Scene
Burt Lancaster — Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis, in Elmer Gantry (1927), portrayed a hustler-cum-evangelist during this country's last bout of prosperity mania in the Roaring 20s. Today, we have a real-life Elmer Gantry who will deliver the invocation at the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. Elmer Gantry became a Hollywood film in 1960; the director/screenwriter was Richard Brooks. Brooks won the Oscar for his "Elmer Gantry" screenplay. In 1927, Sinclair Lewis dedicated Elmer Gantry to H. L. Mencken, an agnostic journalist who was critical of real-life evangelists like Elmer Gantry. Now, taking up the cause of evangelist-bashing in the Mencken-tradition, we have British-born Christopher Hitchens who can turn a phrase like a shiv in the gut. "Elmer Gantry" was a hustler and Rick Warren is a hustler. The Land O'The Free and The Home O'The Brave deserves better than a hustler to preside at one of the signal events in our civil religion (Pace, Professor Bellah.) — the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States. No to Jeremiah Wright! No to Rick Warren! If this is (fair & balanced) truth to power, so be it.

[x Slate]
Three Questions About Rick Warren's Role In The Inauguration
By Christopher Hitchens

It is theoretically possible to make an apparently bigoted remark that is also factually true and morally sound. Thus, when the Rev. Bailey Smith, one of the deputies of the late Jerry Falwell, claimed that "God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew," I was in complete agreement with him. This is because I do not believe that there is any supernatural supervisor who lends an ear to any prayer.

In the same way, if someone publicly charges that "Mormonism is a cult," it is impossible to say that the claim by itself is mistaken or untrue. However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken. That's all in a day's work for the wonderful world of the American evangelical community, and one wishes them all the best of luck in their energetic fundraising and their happy-clappy Sunday "Churchianity" mega-feel-good fiestas. However, do we want these weirdos and creeps officiating in any capacity at the inauguration of the next president of the United States?

It is a fact that Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA, was present at a meeting of the Aspen Institute not long ago and was asked by Lynda Resnick—she of the pomegranate-juice dynasty—if a Jew like herself could expect to be admitted to paradise. Warren publicly told her no. What choice did he have? His own theology says that only those who accept Jesus can hope to be saved. I have just missed the chance to debate on CBS with one of Warren's leading allies and defenders, the Dallas preacherman who calls himself Dr. Robert Jeffress. In the opinion of this learned fellow, even though Mitt Romney "talks about Jesus as his lord and savior, he is not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity."

It is also a fact that Rick Warren proclaims as his original mentor a man named Wallie Amos Criswell, who was the inspirational figure in the rightward move of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s. Rightward in that time and context meant exactly what you might suspect it did—a cold hostility to any civil rights activism on the part of the churches. Theologically, it also meant the crack-brained idea of "dispensationalist premillennialism," or, in other words, the imminence of planetary death and the corollary joys of the "rapture" that would snatch the true believer into the skies just in time.

In his own "purpose-driven" words, Warren has described the dismal nutbag Criswell as the "greatest American pastor of the 20th century" and has told us of the mystic moment in the 1970s when he himself was granted a laying on of Criswell's hands. (The promise, you may not be startled to hear, was of a large and prosperous congregation in the young man's future.)

I think we are all entitled to ask and to keep asking every member of the Obama transition team until we receive a satisfactory answer, the following questions:

• Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews?

• Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons?

• Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and an already nuclear Pakistan, by a half-educated pulpit-pounder raised in the belief that the Armageddon solution is one to be anticipated with positive glee?

As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.

This quite simply cannot stand. Is it possible that Obama did not know the ideological background of his latest pastor? The thought seems plausible when one recalls the way in which he tolerated the odious Jeremiah Wright. Or is it possible that he does know the background of racism and superstition and sectarianism but thinks (as with Wright) that it might be politically useful in attracting a certain constituency? Either of these choices is pretty awful to contemplate.

A president may by all means use his office to gain re-election, to shore up his existing base, or to attract a new one. But the day of his inauguration is not one of the days on which he should be doing that. It is an event that belongs principally to the voters and to their descendants, who are called to see that a long tradition of peaceful transition is cheerfully upheld, even in those years when the outcome is disputed. I would myself say that it doesn't need a clerical invocation at all, since, to borrow Lincoln's observation about Gettysburg, it has already been consecrated. But if we must have an officiating priest, let it be some dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiance and not a tree-shaking huckster and publicity seeker who believes that millions of his fellow citizens are hellbound because they do not meet his own low and vulgar standards.

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, CA. Hitchens was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge (His mother arguing that "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it."), and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and graduated with a "gentleman's 3rd." Hitchens came to the States in 1981 to write for The Nation.]

Copyright © 2008 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.