On a recent episode of Morning Joe, Franklin Graham perplexed a panel of talking heads by dodging around a simple question: Does he consider President Obama to be a Christian? From Media-ite

“I asked him when he was running… how he came to faith in Christ. He said that he was working in the South Side of Chicago in the community and they asked him — the community — asked him what church he went to, and he said ‘I don’t go to church.’ They said, ‘If you’re going to work in the community, you have to join one of our churches.’ And of course, he joined Reverend Jeremiah’s church. So that’s what his answer to my question was.”

“So therefore, by your definition, he’s not a Christian,” Geist said.

“You have to ask him,” Graham said. “I cannot answer that question for anybody.”
Mike Barnicle then asked why Graham couldn’t just say, “Yeah, I believe he’s a Christian,” in light of him saying he is, going to church, and practicing his faith.

“I accept him as what he says. If he says he’s a Christian, I accept that, I’m not going to say he’s not,” Graham said. “All I know is what Jesus Christ has done in my heart and how he’s changed my life.”

I’m not looking forward to another round of “crypto-muslim” insinuations, but judging from Franklin’s performance that’s what we have to expect. My guess is that the slight uptick in the economy means that Republicans will scream about jobs less and about “values” more.

This whole argument is a hot mess. Graham knows good and well that Obama is a Christian. Yet if he admits that, he’s likely to be lynched by his own followers.

The modern American Evangelical sub-culture is a strange thing. Speaking in terms of denominations, it’s a very broad tent. During the colonial period, the Reformed churches would freak out about the presence of Lutherans in the neighborhood. Nowadays, few people make a big deal out of such differences. Politics is the new litmus test.

Consider what’s happening with historian John Fea, blogger at The Way of Improvement Leads Home and columnist here at Patheos. Fea recently posted a column in which he mused that, “Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history.”

That column got a response on The Blaze, a site somehow connected to Glenn Beck. [warning: last time I went there I got hit with three pop-ups.] The response itself isn’t really an attack, – it’s mainly just large block-quotes – but the comments are intensely negative. Apparently, Fea is now a target for Beck fans. According to his most recent statement:

In the last 24 hours I have been called a lot of names. I have been compared to Hitler, Louis Farrakhan, and Woodrow Wilson (yes, you read that last one correctly). Several expressed wishes that I be cast into perdition. A few demanded that the administration at the college where I teach fire me immediately. The culture wars are real.

The ridiculous part is that Fea is not that far from Franklin Graham (by our standards). His column contains head-shaking about Obama’s failure to “articulate the faith-based political vision.” But he suggested that Obama might be a Christian, so here come the torches and pitchforks.

When is religious intolerance not religious intolerance?

For me, it’s when you refuse to give somebody special privileges simply because of their religion. This theme has been in the news in Britain today after a Christian woman lost at an employment tribunal, where she claimed she was forced out of her job because she couldn’t work on Sundays.

“An employment tribunal ruled that Celestina Mba, 57, was not constructively dismissed from her job in 2010. Miss Mba, from south London, worked helping children with severe learning difficulties. The council said it had a duty to ensure children had weekend care. Ms Mba worked for Merton Council at Brightwell Respite Care House in Morden for three years.”

I take issue with Miss Mba’s claim that she couldn’t work on Sundays. She wouldn’t work on Sundays, and yet she still applied for a job which requires employees to be available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days of the year. It seems that she also misled her employer when she was interviewed for the job; “she had told her employer she had ‘difficulties’ working on Sundays before she was employed, but did not specify they were religious”.

This is an important ruling, not only because it protects employers from having to make unreasonable concessions on the grounds of religion, but also because it protects other employees – The days when Miss Mba would not work, ultimately have to be worked by somebody else. Is it fair that other people routinely lose their Sundays off because one person claims a religious right to have Sunday as their “day of rest”? I would argue that it is not reasonable at all.

I would also speculate that Sundays would only be the opening salvo in a case like this – Speaking as a healthcare professional, I would love to never have to work on Christmas day, and to always have a long weekend over Easter, but I accept that that’s not going to happen because of the job that I have chosen to do.

Of course, Mis Mba disagrees:

“Miss Mba said: “I am amazed by this decision. I thought that this country was a Christian country. I worked hard for years at my job, and to lose it because of intolerance towards my faith is shocking to me.”

Where to start… Firstly, we are not a “Christian country”, a claim which Christians seem to love throwing out at every opportunity, in complete ignorance of the fact that they’re in a clear minority. Census data suggests that we’re a 71% Christian country, but that’s at complete odds with reality – Most people record themselves as Church of England, simply because until very recently it was the default entry on the Register of Births and therefore on birth certificates. As of 2008, there were actually only about 1.1 million church-goers in the UK – about 1.5% of the population. So no, Miss Mba. We are not a “Christian Country” – and more to the point, even if we were, it would be irrelevant to this case.

Secondly, and this is a point I think I’ve harped on at great length: Failing to give somebody special privileges that they try to demand over everybody else because they’re religious, is not the same thing as being intolerant of their religion.

I am sick to death of this tired old argument; there really is nothing more to say about it than the last paragraph says, and yet religious people continue to scream like spoiled, obnoxious teenagers when expected to abide by the same conditions as everybody else.