Is Rick Perry as Christian as He Thinks He Is?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry to run for U.S. president," Herald Online, Aug. 11.

Sometimes, I can picture Christ spinning up there in Paradise as he observes people like evangelical "Christian" Texas governor and promising potential U.S. Republican party presidential candidate Rick Perry, who proudly recently held a national prayer event to call for God's help in rescuing Americans "adrift in a sea of moral relativism."

This, from a Christian who would, as he did in Texas, almost certainly slash federal health and education budgets if voted into the White House - in order, of course, to spare U.S. giant corporations and billionaires from a progressive, fair tax burden.

I disagree with the court's ruling. I think the governor misused his office to promote a particular religion. That might have been clearer to the judge if Perry had organized a rally in support of Islam rather than Christianity. There's no difference as far as the First Amendment is concerned.

In any case, Gov. Perry's decision to make his Christian faith a central part of his political identity opens him up to questions not usually asked of presidential candidates.

The press has traditionally been unwilling to question politicians about their religion. But in Perry's case, Christianity is front and center on his platform. I hope David Gregory will ask him some of the following questions when he next appears on Meet the Press, and that other members of the media won't shy away from them either.

First, are Rick Perry's political positions in line with Christ's teachings?

I see a fundamental inconsistency between Perry's concerted opposition to government social programs and his promotion of himself as a Christian politician. When asked about the impact of Texas's low-tax, low-service policies on the poor, he suggested that people who wanted more government services could find them in New York or California.

Christ teaches us to feed the hungry and care for the sick, not to abandon them. Perhaps Gov. Perry hasn't read that part of the Bible where Christ admonishes us to care for "the least among us."

It's more likely that he knows that passage but reads it in a particular light. When I wrote Failing America's Faithful, I interviewed Rick Warren, the evangelical Christian minister and author, about his bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life. Rick very kindly welcomed me to Saddleback, the church he had founded more than 30 years before. He and his wife were gracious to me. I was impressed by the thoughtfulness with which he reached out to his congregation, and his sensitivity to their needs and wants.

I had read his book, and coming from a different Christian tradition, I was struck by how much it focused on getting you to feel good about yourself rather than caring about your neighbor, which Christ had said was the greatest commandment.

Warren, who now runs many charitable programs and supports government efforts to help the poor and the sick, was forthright in explaining that his views had changed since writing the book. The evangelical church he had grown up in, he told me, had focused on the believer's personal relationship to Jesus and pretty much ignored the social side of the gospel. He finally realized that he had "missed the 2,500 passages" in the Bible that called on him to care about other people, including those outside his church.

Does Rick Perry acknowledge those 2,500 passages? That's the second question I'd like the press to ask him. Maybe he believes, like some socially conservative evangelicals, that these passages refer only to personal charity, not government programs. But I don't see any place in the Bible that says we shouldn't use all the tools we have at hand to help the poor, the sick, and the hungry.

The same conservative Christians claim that the Bible teaches them that the government should outlaw gay marriage and stem cell research. But why should the government carry out some Biblical injunctions and not others?

The Bible is certainly open to interpretation. For example, most churches in America today don't require us to gouge out our eyes if we look lustfully at someone, or to cut off our hand if we use it a sinful way. And yet, right there in Matthew 5:27-30 are clear instructions.

How does Gov. Perry interpret the Bible? Even more to the point, I'd like to hear him explain how he arrived at his interpretations. If you're running for president in a democratic country, it's not enough to proclaim that the Bible says something is right or wrong. You must have reasoned positions. Catholics have been taught to inquire into God's will by using our reason, examining nature, and listening to Church teaching -- as well as by interpreting the Bible.

A last question for the governor: does he believe that God agrees with his reading of the Bible? I'm not saying he does believe this; I'm just wondering.

An alternative to assuming our views are aligned with God's is to humbly acknowledge that God works in mysterious ways, and that our human nature may blind us to His will. In that case, our belief in God could lead us to question the infallibility of our own interpretations rather than making us proud. Pride, at least in the Catholic catechism, is one of the seven deadly sins.

Bomb squad called to John Boehner's office

On Sunday morning, a bomb squad was called to John Boehner's West Chester, Ohio office after a policeman spotted three black briefcases sitting outside the door. On the briefcases were hand-written colored paper signs saying "jobs," "oil," and "gas." According to WCPO-TV, police blocked off nearby parking lots and "then spent two hours two hours disrupting the packages one-by-one with a robot to ensure the area was safe." Eventually, as the Associated Press wrote, the "bomb squad blew the cases apart" and found that they contained only papers. We haven't seen any reports about what the papers in the briefcases said (if anything), although that may be because they were blown to smithereens by the bomb squad.

Butler County Sheriff’s Bomb Squad detonated three suspicious briefcases found outside the door at the local office of House Speaker John Boehner Sunday morning, finding no explosives.

A township officer spotted the black briefcases around 11:30 a.m.

Only papers were inside the briefcases, according to township officials.

Boehner’s Cincinnati-Dayton Road office has been the scene of several protests in recent weeks.

Obama Tries to Reclaim Momentum With Midwest Bus Tour

U.S. President Barack Obama is launching a three-state midwestern bus tour aimed at answering criticism that he has not done enough to improve the ailing economy.

The president begins the tour in St. Paul, Minnesota, Monday. He holds a town hall meeting (at 1:05 p.m. EDT) in the town of Cannon Falls, south of St. Paul, expected to focus on ways to create jobs and accelerate economic growth.

The president travels on to the state of Iowa, where he is to hold a second town hall in the town of Decorah (at 6:15 p.m. EDT) on Monday. The White House says participants at the two meetings will include small business owners, local families, private sector leaders, rural organizations, and government officials. Mr. Obama visits Illinois later this week.

The president's approval rating fell after the recent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the debt ceiling battle with Congress.

A recent Gallup poll indicated only 39 percent of Americans approve of the president's job performance, an all-time low for Obama.

The president’s itinerary will give him a heartland backdrop for his message, taking him past small family farms and through fly-speck towns with names like Alpha, Ill., (population, 671). In Cannon Falls, a riverside town in southern Minnesota, Mr. Obama will take part in a town-hall-style meeting in a park.

Other stops include a visit to Seed Savers, a group in Decorah, Iowa, that preserves and trades heirloom seeds; a rural economic forum in Peosta, Iowa; and two more town-hall-style meetings in Alpha and Atkinson, Ill.

The trip will also put Mr. Obama on stage in places where the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination is heating up. Ames, Iowa, just held a straw poll on Saturday that was won by Representative Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota.

After being hunkered down in Washington hammering out the deal on the debt ceiling for much of the summer, Mr. Obama has been eager to hit the road. Last week, he traveled to a factory in Holland, Mich., where he delivered a hard-edged critique of the role House Republicans played in the debt talks.

Mr. Obama also plans to present his own ideas for creating jobs — a familiar menu that includes extending the cut in payroll taxes and pushing for Congressional approval of trade agreements with South Korea and Panama.

White House officials said Mr. Obama did not plan to roll out major new economic initiatives on the trip, though his advisors were busy developing plans that might be introduced later. But the tour will give the president the chance to make his case to the public that the partisan warfare in Washington must end.

“The American people voted for a divided government, but they did not vote for a dysfunctional government,” said Josh Earnest, the deputy White House press secretary, repeating one of his boss’s stock phrases. “And I think that has left the president pretty frustrated.”

Mr. Earnest acknowledged that Mr. Obama expected to encounter some anger about the economy and the discord in Washington from people he meets on the road, though Mr. Earnest pinned the blame for that mainly on Republicans, whom he said “put their partisan affiliation ahead of the country.”

Though the five Congressional districts that Mr. Obama is visiting are solidly Republican, he carried four of them in 2008, losing only Minnesota’s Second District by a narrow margin. The upper Midwest will be a crucial electoral battleground in 2012.

Unlike last week’s trip to Michigan, the bus tour this week will not take the president to regions particularly hard hit by the economic downturn. The National Journal noted that the four counties on his itinerary have lower unemployment rates than the national average, with Winneshiek County in Iowa the lowest, at 5.9 percent.

These towns, the Journal noted, have weathered the bad times relatively well because they have a mix of light manufacturing and agriculture, rather than heavy industry or ravaged industries like construction.

Mr. Obama wraps up his tour in Illinois on Wednesday and returns to the White House, before leaving Thursday for a 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. His aides insist he will stick to his plans, regardless of calls by some Republicans for him to stay in Washington to work on the economy.