WASHINGTON — Maybe we should just call off the National Prayer Breakfast and stop asking presidents to offer their thoughts about faith and religion. If they go beyond making all present feel good about how religious and upright they are, presidents can get into a lot of trouble.
President Obama’s speech to the breakfast last week did not seem terribly controversial when I first listened. He spoke of his own faith and invoked Eleanor Roosevelt’s nice prayer: “Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength.”
Obama added: “I’ve wondered at times if maybe God was answering that prayer a little too literally.”
He never suspected that he was in the midst of one of those hard tasks. Who knew that denouncing religious extremism and calling on people of all faiths to guard against “a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith” would prove to be so controversial? If a president dares to say anything critical about what Christians may have done at any point in history, he is destined to be attacked for engaging in “moral equivalence” and accused of downplaying present dangers.
Obama could not have been clearer in his condemnation of the Islamic State, “a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yazidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”