Suzanne Strempek Shea loves Barack Obama—button-wearing, campaign-check-writing, canvassing-in-New-Hampshire-on-Election-Day loves him. To put it in the universal language of pet lovers: "I'd leave my dog with him," she says.
Strempek Shea isn't used to wearing her political heart so blatantly on her sleeve. Now an award-winning novelist and memoirist, in a previous life Strempek Shea worked as a newspaper reporter, which meant such explicit displays of electoral support were verboten. (Indeed, she says, the only thing that kept her from staking a football-field-sized Obama sign on the lawn outside her Palmer home is the fact that her husband, Tom Shea, is a columnist for the Springfield Republican.)
But there's another reason this all feels so novel to Strempek Shea: she's never been so inspired by a presidential candidate before. "For the first time it was someone I was excited about," she says. "Even if it sounds corny, there's such hope there. I just see such hope and such competency. I was just thrilled…
"Every step of the way I've been so involved and interested," she adds. "It's too bad that I never felt that way before."
So Strempek Shea was thrown by Obama's announcement that celebrity minister Rick Warren would give the invocation at his long-awaited—oh, so long-awaited—Jan. 20 inaugural. "When he made this choice, I was like: Wait a minute," Strempek Shea says.
Obama's selection of Warren wasn't the first decision made by the president-elect that has given some followers fits. Among his more progressive-minded backers, in particular, many of Obama's appointments have been disappointingly incompatible with his campaign promises to change "business as usual" in Washington. They include the heavy representation of Clinton-era insiders (ie., Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel), culminating in the nomination of Hillary Clinton—she of the convenient eleventh-hour change of heart on the war in Iraq—as the anti-war Obama's Secretary of State.
None of these choices should come as a real surprise; Obama, for all his many appealing traits, is still a part of—and beholden to—the political establishment. Certainly the advisers and policy makers Obama chooses to surround himself with as he shapes his presidential agenda mean a lot more than the minister he chooses to say a prayer or two at his inauguration. Still, it's jarring that Obama—the candidate who ran on a message of inclusion and unity—would choose the controversial Warren to play such a symbolically important role on such a symbolically important day.
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Warren is not without his fans, starting with the tens of thousands who come to hear him preach every week at his evangelical megachurch in southern California. In 2007, Warren became a household name among the unchurched when an Atlanta-area woman persuaded a fugitive murderer who had taken her hostage to turn himself in by reading him a passage from Warren's self-help book, The Purpose Driven Life. That book, according to his church's website, has sold 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling hardback in American history.
These days, Warren is back in the spotlight as the media examines his religious beliefs. While his church's extensive charitable outreach—such as its work with the poor and people with AIDS—is impressive, there's also much there that should make any self-respecting Obama supporter shudder. An opponent of gay marriage rights (as is Obama), Warren used his considerable influence to lobby for Proposition 8, California's anti-gay marriage referendum, and he considers homosexuality an aberration comparable to incest and pedophilia. Warren maintains that those of unenlightened religious persuasions—like Jews—are destined for hell. He's also anti-choice, believes wives should defer to their husbands, and in a 2007 MSNBC interview stated unequivocally that he does not believe in evolution.
In a recent op-ed published in newspapers around the country, The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt described Obama's choice of Warren as an insult to his supporters and a grave political misstep. "Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters—feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community—by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead," she wrote.
"Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who've spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration's wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God," Pollitt noted. "I'm all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama's base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far."
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Strempek Shea is among those Obama backers who see him as an antidote to the wrongs of the Bush era. Like many Obama supporters, she is deeply disappointed in his decision to feature Warren at his inauguration. But unlike most of them, she's had the opportunity to witness the controversial minister in the pulpit.
On a Sunday morning in the summer of 2006, Strempek Shea traveled to Lake Forest, Calif., to hear Warren preach at Saddleback Church, the ministry he founded in 1980. She was there as part of the journey she took for her 2008 book, Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith (Beacon Press), which chronicled her visits to dozens of churches around the country, searching for the spiritual welcome she no longer found in the Catholic church in which she'd been raised.
Strempek Shea didn't do much research about Saddleback before her visit; as with all the churches she attended, she didn't want too much background information to color her first impressions. And while she ultimately found Warren's church long on showbiz slickness and short on the warmth and intimacy she was seeking, Strempek Shea did not leave unimpressed.
On the day of her visit, Warren urged his congregation to commit to using their strength and abilities to make a difference in the world. At the end of the sermon, worshipers were directed to a courtyard where various charities and social service groups had set up information booths, ready to sign up volunteers.
Compared to the hell-and-damnation preaching ministers she'd encountered at many other churches, Strempek Shea found Warren's message a pleasant change. "What he wanted us to do was what Barack wants us to do: he wants us to take action," she says. "I'm big on that. I'd rather be given an assignment in this world than just be told I'm bad or good. Let's go out and share what we can do. &
"That one Sunday, at least for me, made sense," Strempek Shea continues. "I actually liked what I heard that day. If I didn't know more [about Warren], I'd think, Oh, he's a nice guy."
Strempek Shea suspects Warren's "nice guy" persona—with his plain-spoken style and ubiquitous Hawaiian shirts, "he looks like your brother-in-law at a family gathering," she says—might have contributed to Obama's decision to include him in the inauguration. "What he was savvy in doing was picking somebody that a lot of people knew about," she says. "He's a name. He's got this enormous following for his book; he's got this giant church."
And, the efforts of commentators like Pollitt notwithstanding, Warren has managed to avoid the level of controversy generated by Obama's long-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose heavily publicized statements about race and racism in America (pointing out, for instance, its history of government-sanctioned discrimination) almost sandbagged the candidate's chances last year. Much as we may want to believe the facile assertions that Obama's election signals a "post-race" era in America, the reality is, Wright's unflinching statements about racism made him a polarizing figure, while Warren's incendiary assertions about, for instance, gay people have not stopped millions from embracing him as a respected spiritual leader.
Indeed, Strempek Shea sees Warren emerging as "a new Billy Graham," the White House's long-time unofficial religious consultant, to whom almost every president since Eisenhower (the Catholic JFK being the sole exception) has turned for spiritual counsel. Now 90, "Billy Graham is past his sell-by date," Strempek Shea notes. Warren, it seems, is his heir apparent; during the presidential campaign, tellingly, both Obama and John McCain traveled to Saddleback for a candidates' forum moderated by Warren.
Strempek Shea is not convinced that Graham's position as presidential spiritual adviser needs to be filled. "Maybe it's another thing that's past its sell-by date in this country," she says. But if it is filled, she wonders, couldn't our multi-cultural, multi-religious nation find a more inclusive approach? "Are we going to have a national rabbi?" she wonders.
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Strempek Shea's enthusiasm for Obama does not prevent her from seeing his flaws. The former reporter in her has concerns about the shortness he sometimes displays with the press, and she was disappointed because his campaign didn't focus more on the environment and poverty ("But that's a whole other story," she says).
She's also disappointed that Obama does not share her support for gay marriage, although she recognizes that that's a position that can probably still sink a candidate on the national level. "Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that candidate has a chance," she says. "Who knows what goes on in the back rooms? 'If we have this person, it's going to alienate this group.' & Every step of this is weighed."
But should the history-making inauguration of the nation's first multi-racial president serve as a platform for someone who preaches a message of exclusion? "For [Obama] to pick this guy who discriminates against others& If you've known [discrimination], then why do you want to further that by giving a pulpit or a soap box to someone who discriminates?" Strempek Shea asks.
Picking Warren was a political gamble for Obama; whether it hurts or helps him remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: "It wasn't exactly an inspired choice," Strempek Shea notes.
Had Obama turned to her for guidance, Strempek Shea would have had plenty of better suggestions, starting with the many warm, inclusive ministers she met while researching her book: the Rev. David Flaherty, pastor of St. Sebastian's, an alternative Catholic church in Baltimore; Pastor Robin Gorsline of Metropolitan Community Church in Richmond, Va., which ministers to gay, bisexual and transgendered people. She'd even have some local suggestions, starting with Sister Jane Morrissey, former president of Springfield's Sisters of St. Joseph, who spends her days fighting poverty and injustice and is, in Strempek Shea's words, "love on two legs."
Or Obama might have done well to choose someone from his own faith, the United Church of Christ, which preaches an inclusive message. "That's God—God is love," Strempek Shea says. "Did God say, 'I love you unless you're this and that?' No."
Warren's role in Obama's presidency may only be ceremonial, but, Strempek Shea notes, "who [Obama's] choosing here is going to go down in history. … This is a big deal."
