Dr. Dobson, Barack Obama and this 'Catholic Moment'

This first volley between Dr. Dobson and Senator Obama marks a turn in the public debate in this campaign season.

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - Now it begins.

The Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, has begun his outreach to faith based voters. Dr. James Dobson, a respected voice within the evangelical protestant community and beyond, has engaged the debate.

The media is screaming "Bible Wars".

What is this all about? What does it mean for Catholic Christians? How should we respond?

As someone who has had the privilege of meeting Dr Dobson, I have great respect for the wonderful work he is doing and has done for the "poorest of the poor", children in the first home of the whole human race, their mothers womb. I consider him to be one of the great defenders of true marriage and the family founded upon it.

However, I am deeply concerned at the damage that this entire new front in the election of 2008 might cause if not properly approached.

Dr. Dobson, legitimately utilizing his radio pulpit, is raising some serious questions concerning the Democratic Presidential candidate's efforts to garner the support of evangelical Protestants and other Christians. He is also no fan of the nominee of the other Party.

I know that the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, is also reaching out to Catholic Christians. In fact, Doug Kmiec, whom we have published on Catholic Online, was numbered among the thirty participants who recently met with Senator Obama in what is hailed as his first effort at building a base of support for his campaign in the Christian community.

Dr. Dobson used the text of a speech which Barack Obama gave in 2006 to a group called "Call to Renewal" to take exception to Senator Obama's efforts to present himself as a viable candidate for Christian voters. Doctor Dobson questioned the candidate's interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures and made a reference to his constitutional interpretation which was less than flattering.

In that speech, Barack Obama said the following: "Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?"

The Senator then used the old argument used by some who want to discount the proper role of the principles found within the Scriptures as relevant for good governance. He made reference to the Old Testament dietary laws.

Those guidelines were offered by a loving God to assist a nomadic people in their efforts to remain healthy during their sojourn through the desert. Then he used the Levitical texts referring to slavery, which, in the face of a practice which was normative in other Nations at the time the texts were written, called the Nation of Israel to a radical empathy and justice toward those in indentured servitude.

With poor or nonexistent exegesis, Obama tried to use these passages to insinuate that the Bible has little relevance for modern governance. He also failed to point out that all Sacred Scripture, for the Christian, is given its fullness of meaning, only through the Paschal mystery, the Incarnation, Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We see the Old Testament now fulfilled, completed and given new spiritual meaning in the light of the coming of the Savior. Perhaps, in his own Catechetical instruction as a Christian, he was not taught that.

Next, Obama, in one of a few references in that speech to the New Testament, used the Lord Jesus' instructions in the Sermon on the Mount, a textbook on the life of virtue and the radical Christian call to discipleship, to do the same thing. This teaching was given to those who, aided by the grace which would be given through this Paschal mystery, would take up the Lord's continuing redemptive mission through the Church and continue His work in the world until He returned.

He used this teaching as another example of what he was insisting were the perils of placing the principles offered by the Bible into the sphere of governance. Again, this was a poor example of exegesis and a failure to truly present orthodox, classical Christian teaching.

Using these Biblical texts as a vehicle for making his political points were at least disingenuous. He did not distinguish which principles contained within the Scared Texts are intended for the followers of Jesus Christ and which can properly be used as guides for establishing just principles of governance within pluralistic civil societies.

Also, we who are Christians need to realize an even more important truth, that the Bible is the Book of the Church which was given to and for the community of disciples who gathered to follow the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, and would then become His Body on the earth. It can only be understood, in its fullness of meaning and its implications for living, within that community.Of course, that understanding of both the Bible and the Church is Catholic.

I first met James Dobson in the early 1990's when I served as a Dean at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a Catholic College which was in the midst of a great renewal of faith. I was sent, on behalf of the President, to invite him to receive a well deserved honorary Doctorate for his wonderful work of supporting Marriage and the family. After that event I had the privilege of interviewing him several times on a radio program which I hosted back than and of introducing him to the wonderful writings on the family by the late Servant of God, John Paul II.

Then, in the 1990's when I was the Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice, we bestowed upon him a "Defender of the Family" award for his tireless work on behalf of the family. The family is the first church, the first school, the first society, the first economy, the first classroom, and the first and most important of all mediating institutions. Dr. Dobson is a champion of the family. He is one of the people whom I personally admire the most for his work in helping people to value the family and to live its full potential.

Dr. Dobson is an evangelical Protestant Christian. I sensed as I read these reports that this good Christian man is frustrated at the turn of events in the American Political scene and what we now face as we move into the General election. I am as well.

For example, as it relates to the fundamental human rights issue of our age, the right to life. We have two candidates in the two major political parties in America running for President who are both professing Christians. One, Senator Obama, fails to hear the cry of the most vulnerable of our human family, the ones whom Mother Teresa called the "poorest of the poor", children in the first home of the whole human race, their mothers womb. Yet, he is presenting himself as a champion of the poor and a social justice candidate.

The other, Senator McCain, at least recognizes that there is a Right to Life. He identifies our youngest neighbors as human persons who have a right to be born. Yet, he still supports deadly research on human embryos, thereby treating those human lives as property. He refers to them as "spare embryos".

He wants the current practice of abortion on demand which was sanctioned by the US Supreme Court though Roe and its progeny, changed at the Federal level. Currently, in the United States of America,children can be killed while in the womb for any reason. The State not only not protects them but calls such a practice a Constitutional "right".

However, he then wants the entire matter returned to the States. In other words, States could decide for themselves whether such feticide would be sanctioned in their own territorial bounds.If abortion is killing an innocent human person,which it objectively is,it should not be allowed in any State, period.

Now, I know that some of my readers insist that one or the other of these men is not Christian because of this or that position they take on issues. I suggest that they reconsider Christian history. Christians can be wrong. For example, many Christians, including some Church leaders, supported slavery, even though it was later rejected and is now declared to be intrinsically evil by the Church.

With respect to Protestant Christians, when the authority of a teaching office in the Church to help us to understand the meaning of the Biblical text and to assist in discerning the guidance of the Holy Spirit among us was usurped in the Protestant Reformation, it was replaced by individual interpretations of the Bible. A kind of "everyone for themselves" approach to interpreting the Bible. That is a real problem.

You can end up with difficulty in offering the Bible for deriving principles of governance when the underlying culture, especially if that culture no longer accepts its authority. You can also end up with the current situation we find throughout some of the Protestant Christian community of an inability to use it to govern their own internal disputes.

I suggest that this may be a real "Catholic Moment" in American politics, to borrow the title of a good book written years ago by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. What is needed right now is for informed, well catechized, thinking Catholic Christians to step up to the political plate and offer the wisdom of the Catholic Social tradition for guidance in good governance in this perilous time.

In that Tradition, the fundamental right to life for all human persons, at every age and every stage, is grounded not only in the Revelation found within the Sacred Scriptures and taught in an unbroken line within the Christian Tradition, but it is revealed in the Natural law. That Natural law is accessible to all men and women. It can be known by them, whether they are Christians or have any faith tradition whatsoever.

This kind of classical thought concerning the presence of an objective moral code by which we are to govern our life together was at the heart of the Western vision of good governance. It informed the thinking of the founders of the American experiment. They did not invent the notion of inalienable rights, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, such as the right to life. They were sons and daughters of the patrimony of Western Civilization which was influenced by the Church.

It is only by insisting and proposing once again that there is a Natural Law which can be known, and which ought to inform our own attempts at self governance that we can hope to build a truly just society.

Let's take the issue of the fundamental Human Right to Life as an example.

Let's face it, no one is really making the argument any longer that the child in the womb is anything but a human person. We all rejoice as surgery in the womb advances to earlier and earlier stages. Our Criminal laws recognize that when an aggressor intentionally kills the child in the womb, they have killed a human person and can be prosecuted. When mothers have miscarriages, we say they have lost their baby. Sonograms show us what our conscience as a Nation refuses to see, every procure abortion is the taking of innocent human life.

No matter what the positive law currently says, most people know abortion is immoral and wrong. Even Senator Obama is now trying to present himself as opposed to abortion, even though he strongly supports the so called "abortion right". Sadly, he has not yet seen the connection which I believe could open his eyes, that the child in the womb is his neighbor and that every child with no voice is the poor. For that reason I cannot and will not support his candidacy.

If Senator Obama becomes the President, I will continue to try to persuade him and others of the truth of the pro-life position. The way that I believe we can do that most effectively is to do so from the position of the Natural Law. Yes, that Natural Law is confirmed by Revelation. I am a Christian by choice and I readily share my faith with anyone who will listen.

However, my insistence that abortion is the taking of innocent human life and is therefore always and everywhere immoral and should be illegal is not dependent upon the teaching of my Church. It is rooted in the Natural Law. I can and I do insist that it should be the law of the land. As long as these phony "religious" arguments are used as a means to keep this and other fundamental truths away from our civil discourse, the blood of the children will continue to flow.

I am deeply saddened that Catholics have failed to take the role which they need to take at this critical time in our history as a Nation. Many Catholics do not even know of the existence of the Social teaching of the Catholic Church. Or, if they are familiar with it at all, they think it is only for "religious people". Others have been sold a bill of goods, opting to first identify themselves by political labels and only then to consider Catholic Social Teaching only peripherally.

I am saddened as well that some lay Catholic leaders with public prominence in the arena of political activism have paraded their conservatism or their neo-conservatism as somehow synonymous with Catholic teaching, at least by implication. Sometimes they have also not informed their own positions on the great issues of our time first by the teaching of the Catholic Church and its Social tradition.

This first volley between Dr. Dobson and Senator Obama marks a turn in the public debate in this campaign season. I hope it is not the beginning of a new form of "religious warfare", with objective moral truth as one of its casualties. For that not to happen, it will take Catholic thinkers to step into the field of this verbal battle and present an apologetic which can help to move the issues which matter most forward.

If they do, this may yet become a real 'Catholic Moment'.

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