Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven B.S.

The purpose being, of course, to suck up to the Left:

The first fracas concerns Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose-Driven Life, who is pastor of a large congregation in Lake Forest, California. The members of his flock number in the thousands. When Warren invites a speaker to man his pulpit, he is giving that person a huge endorsement within the evangelical community. Recently, he asked Senator Barack Obama of Illinois to address his parishioners on the subject of AIDS in Africa.

Many of Warren's coreligionists, along with prominent figures in the pro-life movement, have appealed to him to rescind his invitation. They point to the fact that Obama has not only been consistently pro-abortion, he even fought a law preventing children born alive in aborted abortions from being starved to death. Nightline asked Warren about that on the air, and he explained we must fight people where we disagree with them and work with them where there is common ground.

So the debate is framed for all denizens of TV Land. One side holds that being pro-abortion marks you as a pariah while the other believes in a more inclusive approach allowing for consensus-building and bipartisanship for the benefit of humankind. And you, dear viewer, can choose what side you're on. There is only one problem here; namely, the abortion issue is so far off-subject of Obama's appearance, it turns into nitpicking from left field. The flaw in the Warren-Obama love affair is its inherent ludicrous fraudulence.

Ask yourself this: what does Sen. Obama know about AIDS in Africa that you and I don't know? He has never done anything significant on the subject or studied it in some unique way. Sen. Frist, on the other hand, has spent extensive volunteer time there as a doctor treating actual patients. If the goal is to gain substantive knowledge and experiential insight, Frist is the man to hear, not Obama. All Obama will do is have a few of his aides throw together some stats anyone could get in five minutes on Google.

Why then Obama? Answer: for a series of reasons ranging from the cowardly to the cynical, all of them stylistic rather than substantive. 1) He is black, Frist is not. 2) He is a Democrat, Frist is not. 3) He has an African name, never mind his white mother and Harvard education. 4) He is a media darling, unlike Frist, whose volunteer work in Africa has never registered on the media radar screen.

In short, Rick Warren is pandering to a bunch of left-wing interest groups. If he wanted to engage Obama in a real quest to break new ground in working across the American cultural divide for meaningful goals, he could have asked him to come with a platform of new ideas how to help urban kids out of poverty. I would have liked to hear that address myself.

Disclaimer: I used to attend Saddleback Church and was underwhelmed by Warren and the whole McChurch phenomenon. I'm not surprised he's sucking up to pols; there wasn't a whole lot of God in his pulpit to begin with.

I don't miss the biblical Mad Libs, either.