Obamateurism of the Day

The national media has begun noticing that Barack Obama has spoken more often about his faith during public appearances, probably after polls showed that around half of all Americans aren’t quite sure what Obama believes. Obama has written about his Christian faith for years, but as my good friend and colleague John Hinderaker points out at Power Line, it doesn’t appear that Obama has read much about it:

“So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead — being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me,” he continued.

John points out that Jesus never actually said either of those things:

It is only fair to note, too, that some of what he said was right on the money. But Obama’s answer causes one to suspect that he would be among those who, as in the Pew poll that is also in the news today, would have trouble answering basic questions about his own religion. The Golden Rule is a fine idea, but it is not a principle unique to Christianity. Nor did Jesus ever say that we should be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers; Obama apparently referred to the story of Cain and Abel.

This is the point I want to make: Biblical precepts are often twisted by liberals to support socialism. Jesus was not a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disclaimed any political agenda. And the moral of the story in Genesis is not that we are, or should be, our brothers’ keepers. Rather, the phrase comes from Cain’s answer when God asks him the whereabouts of his brother Abel, whom Cain has just killed. Cain denies any knowledge, and adds the self-exculpatory question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The point of the story is not that Cain was responsible for looking after Abel, like an Old Testament Nancy Pelosi. Cain was condemned not for failing to keep watch over his brother, but for killing him.

John covers the “brother’s keeper” issue very well, but the Golden Rule issue has another dimension. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves, which is not the same thing as the Golden Rule; the latter refers to behavior alone, while the former relates to what is in our hearts as well as what we do. That’s really the difference between philosophy and religion, and perhaps one of the reasons why Obama’s occasional discourses on faith seem both uninformed and superficial, almost rote.

In any case, one would think that if Obama wanted to make an impression on voters by talking about his faith and how it speaks to him that he would study it long enough to understand it, or at least to know enough to tell between the Old and New Testaments.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

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