For my 18th birthday I got a subscription to National Review from my grandfather. When I thanked him he replied brusquely, "You've spent your whole life in that house getting one side of the story. I thought it was time you heard the other side."
As I was preparing to go to college in a faraway city, that was music to my ears—I was moving out of my parents' house anyway, and this meant I'd be exposed to even more new ideas. As the year went on however, I read each new issue with a growing sense of disappointment: not because the ideas were conservative, but because so many of the articles were just flat-out illogical and poorly argued.
Those memories came flooding back when reading David French's article, "Is Obama Really a Christian?", in the current issue of the magazine. What's most striking—and disappointing—about the piece is its smallness of mind. When all the huffing and puffing is done about Rev. Wright, Black liberation theology, and the callers to Christian radio shows who are (still) convinced the president is a Muslim, French's argument boils down to the fact that President Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ...and acts like it.
Barack Obama may believe in black-liberation theology, or he may not. He may have a close relationship with God, or he may not. We can’t know his heart. But when it comes to his civic religion, President Obama is his church’s—and liberal Christianity’s—great and mighty instrument.
In reaching that conclusion, French betrays a startling degree of ignorance about the UCC and the broader Christian tradition. As Charlie Pierce noted on Esquire's Politics blog,
The UCC is a direct theological descendant of the Congregationalism that brought the Pilgrims here. Gradually, after the Great Awakening of the mid-18th Century, while losing people to Unitarianism, the Congregationalists began to merge with other denominations until the UCC was formed. But, right from the time the Pilgrims got on the boat, the church had a tradition of self-governance and a fundamental revulsion at the notion of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. It's not the New-Age-y self-help group that (French) seems to think it is. That the UCC is extensively involved in various causes that give the author the willies is his problem, not the church's.
Except for a passing mention that some Catholics didn't agree with some of Bill Clinton's policies, French demonstrates no awareness of Christian theology, traditions or practices outside of those within the relatively narrow confines of American Protestantism in recent decades. If only he'd been writing for a journal of serious conservative intellectual thought, maybe he'd have found an editor to introduce him to a world of Christian conservatism and orthodoxy that extended beyond his own experience.
