My candidate is Christian-er than your candidate

  • Found myself kind of annoyed with this story.

    Focus on the Fam­ily founder James Dob­son appeared to throw cold water on a pos­si­ble pres­i­den­tial bid by for­mer Sen. Fred Thomp­son while prais­ing for­mer House Speaker Newt Gin­grich, who is also weigh­ing a pres­i­den­tial run, in a phone inter­view Tuesday.

    “Every­one knows he’s con­ser­v­a­tive and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family move­ment stands for,” Dob­son said of Thomp­son. “[But] I don’t think he’s a Chris­t­ian; at least that’s my impres­sion,” Dob­son added, say­ing that such an impres­sion would make it dif­fi­cult for Thomp­son to con­nect with the Repub­li­can Party’s con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian base and win the GOP nomination.

    So Thomp­son has ‘come out strongly’ for pro-family issues. And a spokesman for Thomp­son points out that he’s been bap­tized into the Church of Christ. But Dob­son — who has to know that his opin­ions on these mat­ters carry weight with a lot of peo­ple — just doesn’t find his name in the Book of Life?

    And to make it really con­fus­ing, Dob­son has been talk­ing up Newt Gin­grich? Now I love hear­ing Gin­grich talk — he’s the kind of strong, intel­li­gent ‘move­ment con­ser­v­a­tive’ that we don’t get to hear much any­more. But given that his track record with the women in his life is almost as bad as Bill Clinton’s, how is it that Dob­son con­sid­ers that he is washed in the blood of the Lamb and Thomp­son isn’t?

    But wait, it gets more annoying:

    In a follow-up phone con­ver­sa­tion, Focus on the Fam­ily spokesman Gary Schnee­berger stood by Dobson’s claim. He said that, while Dob­son didn’t believe Thomp­son to be a mem­ber of a non-Christian faith, Dob­son nev­er­the­less “has never known Thomp­son to be a com­mit­ted Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith.”

    “We use that word—Christian—to refer to peo­ple who are evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians,” Schnee­berger added.

    Ohhh. Well, now I get the pic­ture. So really, it’s okay for me to get behind a hea­then like Fred Thomp­son, because accord­ing to this def­i­n­i­tion, I’m not a Chris­t­ian either.

    “We use that word — Chris­t­ian…” Boy, I’ve got some words I’d like to use.


    Related posts:

    1. A Chris­t­ian in Afghanistan
    2. Chris­t­ian graves to face Mecca
    3. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea
    4. The destruc­tion of hearths
    5. Chris­t­ian Carnival

    April 4th, 2007 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Eliz­a­beth 04.04.2007

    It makes me very sad to hear those words from any­one any­more (although I used to be very will­ing to say who I believed to be a Chris­t­ian and who surely wasn’t). There but for the grace of God.….

  • Grace

    It’s a slip­pery slope for sure. I found when I started writ­ing this that it was hard to talk about it with­out slip­ping into some Phar­iseeism as well (and maybe I didn’t com­pletely succeed).

    But I think that when Chris­tians get into these pub­lic con­tests of mak­ing peo­ple prove how “Chris­t­ian” they are, we deserve some of the scorn that non-Christians have for us. What would it mat­ter for a per­son to “talk openly about his faith,” as Dobson’s spokesman wants Thomp­son to do, if it was all for show?

    And to throw an extra bit of food for thought into the dis­cus­sion, I note that when Pro­fes­sor Bain­bridge blogged about this (Link HERE), two com­menters men­tioned that a lot of fun­da­men­tal­ists don’t con­sider Catholics to be Christian(!!)

    Well, I’d love to think they wouldn’t be so con­demn­ing of Ortho­dox Chris­tians if they knew about us (which they prob­a­bly don’t), but I think I’d be fool­ing myself.

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