Barack Obama’s Biblical Errors

James Dobson, host of the Focus on the Family radio show, is attacking Barack Obama for distorting the Biblical Scripture in his ‘Call to Renewal’ Keynote Address given June 28, 2006, and where Obama argues, “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.”

In this speech on religious tolerance, Obama makes the following statement concerning Religious differences:

And 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? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

Dobson takes issue with Obama making this reference to him, saying that Obama is “diminishing” him and has put him “under fire.” While Obama’s remarks seemed pretty innocuous to me, somehow Dobson reads this single statement as both equating him with Al Sharpton and as accusing Dobson of wanting to strip non-Christians of their human rights and expel them from America. Dobson is not only taking Obama’s remarks out of context to an absurdly dishonest extreme, he is also distorting Obama’s remarks, which are meant to unify everyone despite their religious differences, into something meant to split Americans apart on theological grounds.

Dobson and his host then turn to attacking Obama’s biblical references, criticizing him for saying the bible dictates “stoning your child if he strays from the faith.” The host clarifies that the bible dictates stoning a “beligerant drunkard son” in Deuteronomy 21, and then Dobson criticizes Obama for claiming the passage promotes stoning the son for leaving the faith, and argues “that’s not what the scripture says.”

But the scripture does say we should kill those who preach other faiths in Deuteronomy 13 and those who practice other faiths in Deuteronomy 17. Dobson is either being willfully deceptive or has not read his bible

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview,” Dobson argues, citing the following portion of Obama’s speech:

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This sounds pretty straightforward. Obama is arguing that, because people have different religious backgrounds, we must make rational arguments based on an empirical understanding of reality that appeal to our common experience in that reality. Dobson is offended by this truism, and asks his audience to “stick with me” while he twists Obama’s words into something completely alien to what he actually said:

What the senator is saying there, in essence, is that I can’t seek to pass legislation, for example, that bans partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don’t see that as a moral issue, and if I can’t get everyone to agree with me it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that, uh, I find offensive to the scripture. Now that is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.

It’s also a fruitcake interpretation of Obama’s remarks.

Dobson, of course, sidesteps the core message in Obama’s speech, that there are many ways of interpreting the scriptures, and the religiously devout must find arguments universal to all people to promote their positions. There are many challenging questions for people of all faiths to consider in Obama’s words, but James Dobson chooses to hide from confronting the issues of religious unity in a world of cultural diversity, pretending not to hear those challenges.

Dobson’s dishonesty, misrepresenting Obama’s remarks and lying about the Biblical Scriptures, betray his political aims despite his attempts to obfuscate them behind a veil of Christianity. A world of people who can set aside their religious differences in favor of reasoning based on empirical understanding has no need for people like Dobson, who have made a career out of promoting an “us and them” xenophobic mentality in their followers.

Just as Dobson tells his followers that the Bible doesn’t say what’s written on its pages, but what he tells them is written, so he argues that Obama’s words don’t mean what they say, but what Dobson’s own political survival depends on his followers believing they mean.