Baptist Press Criticizes Obama's Speech on Race

Last week the Baptist Press of the Southern Baptist Convention published an article about Obama's speech on race relations. Most of the article was a straightforward account of the speech, but at the end of the article, there was this:

Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow for family empowerment with Family Research Council Action, said Obama's speech did not address the underlying nature of his beliefs, which are characterized by "a 21st century form of big government socialism."

"Those are the beliefs of liberation theology," Blackwell, an African American himself, said in a statement. "Those are the offensive root beliefs underlying many of Rev. Wright's sermons. And though Barack Obama does not embrace Mr. Wright's offensive language, he does embrace this government-solves-everything-through-socialism worldview.

"His speech was magnificent in its elegance and rhetoric, but today Mr. Obama reminded me yet again of his worldview that embraces, among other things, partial-birth abortion, military weakness and economic socialism," Blackwell said.

Is this the best the Southern Baptist Convention can do? As far as I know, Blackwell is not even a Southern Baptist. But was it really that difficult to find someone who had at least a few positive words to say about Obama's speech? Southern Baptists often lament that they are viewed critically and unfairly by many outside their denomination, but with an article like this, maybe they deserve sometimes the bad press that they receive.

This is somewhat personal to me because I have a Southern Baptist background and I am well aware of the racist history of the Southern Baptist Convention. The whole reason to create the convention in the first place in 1845 was to allow slave owners to become missionaries. So you would think that the current Southern Baptist leadership would be more sensitive to issues of race and more appreciative of a speech that is being universally praised as a creative and daring breakthrough in race relations.

Comments

[DHFabian]

Re: K. Blackwell: So, is it preferable to have a government that does nothing? Of course government's role is to solve problems that are too big for individuals to solve. That is what they are paid to do, and they are paid very, very well to do it.

We pay taxes for the sake of the common good, and government's role is to allocate those funds appropriately for the common good, whether it is to fund schools or fire departments, provide a trained police force, or to aid those citizens who are not (for whatever reason) able to provide for themselves; on this latter point, Americans aren't swamped with compassion, but minimizing poverty is for the common good. When government "goes wrong", the collective wealth is misdirected into enriching the already wealthy, into war, etc. That is when the people have a responsibility to reform their government.

[Streak]

Obama clearly says that government is not the answer to everything. But as DHFabian notes, government can do some things well, and part of that is holding us together in that thing we know as community.

I wish we could talk about government the way Canadians do--they don't love government, but they don't hate it either.

[B-Rob]

Wonder why the Southern Baptists chose Ken Blackwell to talk about race? What . . . no other Southern Baptist was "qualified"?