Methodist Pastor points out intolerance on the Left and the Right

Adam Hamilton, the Pastor of a United Methodist Church in the Kansas City Metro area, points out intolerance on the Right and Left in a recent post on from his outstanding religious blog Seeing Gray. Rev. Hamilton hits the nail on the head about the tunnel vision among both ideological extremes.

Seeing Gray: Faith, Morality, and Politics in a Black and White World
Intolerance on the Left and the Right
By Adam Hamilton
Thursday, December 18, 2008

Last week Rich Cizik was asked to step down as Vice President of Governmental Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals after admitting, in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR that he would support Civil Unions for homosexuals (while opposing gay marriage). Rich was listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential thinkers and he had worked for the National Association of Evangelicals for 28 years. He had already riled folks at the NAE for his concern over environmental issues, but with his willingness to personally support the idea of civil unions he had gone too far for some in the NAE.

Rich represents the new evangelicalism - orthodox in theology, deeply committed to Christ, a bit more progressive on social issues, and trying to find a more compassionate way of thinking about the divisive issues of our time. Rich’s views represent a large number of young evangelicals. In twenty years the National Association of Evangelicals will either look a lot more like Rich, or it will have become irrelevant.

The right is often characterized by the left as intolerant. Rich’s departure is pointed to by the left as another example of this. But the right is not alone in struggling with tolerance. Barack Obama surprised the left by asking Pastor Rick Warren to offer the invocation at his inauguration (and civil rights activist Joseph Lowery to offer the benediction). This touched off a firestorm of criticism for his choice because Warren opposes gay marriage.

Is it essential that a pastor support gay marriage in order to be invited to give the invocation at the inauguration? Warren is perhaps the most influential pastor in America today. His choice represents a statement about Obama’s desire to bring together people across the sociological and theological spectrum. To suggest that only pastors who support gay marriage be invited to pray at the inauguration excludes most pastors in this country and is as intolerant on the left as Cizik’s dismissal was on the right.

http://adamhamilton.cor.org/2008/12/18/intolerance-on-the-left-and-the-right/