It's OK for BHO to invoke God but not Christians?>>Obama and Faith

by Jonah Goldberg at TownHall.com

The fight over health care took the most interesting turn last week. President Obama briefly switched from wonkish frippery about bending cost curves to speaking of faith. Reaching out to progressive faith leaders in two massive conference calls, Obama insisted that God was on his side. Expanding health care fulfills a "core moral and ethical obligation that we look out for one another ... that I am my brother's keeper, my sister's keeper."

This would be an easy opportunity to call attention, once again, to the double standards applied to Obama. When President George W. Bush invoked God as his inspiration, many liberals saw our theocrat-in-chief taking a sledgehammer to the wall between church and state. When Obama does likewise, it's inspiring, spiritual leadership.........

But in recent years, Democratic rhetoric has been changing, for several reasons. One, many voters are put off by such double-talk. Another reason is that many smart liberals have noticed that some religious Americans are more activist on economic and environmental issues but are turned off by what they perceive as pugnacious secularism.

During the last presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was comfortable speaking the language of the social gospel movement, historically the religious wing of American progressivism. But Obama was even better. Speaking during the campaign at an evangelical church in South Carolina, he said, "I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on Earth." He supported Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and kept the agency when he took over, albeit with a slight name change. He courted evangelical pastor Rick Warren. His social agenda, went a constant refrain, was deeply informed by the injunction that we "are our brother's keeper, our sister's keeper." ....................

Politics has always been a contest of values, and religion remains the chief source of those values. Our political discourse has long been cheapened by the canard that only conservatives try to use the state to impose a religiously informed moral vision, while liberals are guided by science, reason and logic as well as some secular conception of decency and compassion. No party has a monopoly on such resources, and it's about time we all recognized that.

Read the whole article at TownHall.com....