The Real Rick Warren

By Amie Newman, RH Reality Check. Posted December 22, 2008.

...which advocates comprehensive sex education and "a faith-based commitment to sexual and reproductive rights, including access to voluntary contraception, abortion, and HIV/STD prevention and treatment." The Religious Institute on Sexuality, Justice, and Healing, which authored the declaration, has also called on Obama to adopt an approach focused on preventing unintended pregnancies.

RH Reality Check has featured the voices of Rev. Debra Haffner, Rev. Carlton Veazy and so many others who advocate for a faith-based approach to sexual and reproductive health and rights, one that aligns so well with President Elect Obama's vision.

And, yet, it's Pastor Rick Warren who will join President Elect Obama on stage when he is inaugurated. Warren who advocates strongly for the abstinence-only based ideological restrictions in our Global AIDS Plan - PEPFAR. It's Warren who has advocated to retain these restrictions which clash wholeheartedly with Obama's plan to strip them away. 

Warren awarded President Bush the first ever "Medal of P.E.A.C.E." for his work on HIV/AIDS, as Lindsay Beyerstein reported for RH Reality Check. However, as Beyerstein writes, 

For all the mutual good will on display, Warren's agenda may well clash with Obama's plans to reshape American AIDS policy.  

It is hard to imagine Obama and Warren's agendas for any sexual or reproductive health issues aligning at this point, making it all the more puzzling why Obama chose Warren for this role. In an expose on Religion Dispatches, Tom Davis writes of Warren's die-hard positions on social issues all while taking more "moderate" stances on issues of global warming, poverty, war and AIDS (though, as I note above, supporting the imposition of religious restrictions on global AIDS policy is not moderate). Davis writes of Warren,

On the eve of the 2004 presidential election, he sent a letter to his congregation telling them that there were five non-negotiable issues that should determine their vote—abortion, stem-cell research, cloning, homosexual marriage, and euthanasia. In fact, these five issues are barely mentioned in the Bible; Jesus never spoke about them, nor did the prophets.

Curiously, however, Warren made no mention of those issus that he had claimed to care deeply about as a "new evangelical" - global warming, poverty, and war. Warren seems to have empathy for some and not for others - and this is where Davis identified Warren's weakness:

As far as empathy is concerned, there seems to be scant evidence that Rick Warren and many other evangelical writers have tried to put themselves in the woman’s position, or that they can imagine what it would be like to have to make that decision.  

Rick Warren is not a man that symbolizes common ground. Warren has positioned himself as a key player in what in words has been called a new evangelism but in practice is nothing more than shining up some old shoes. As soon as the announcement was made that Warren would provide the invocation, protests sprung up on Facebook and elsewhere. We'll see if Warren really does have such a front and center role at the inauguration after all. As a religious leader, he is a brilliant politician. 

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