Amy on Texas Faith: Does President Obama need to “own God?”
Question by William McKenzie:
Sally Quinn minced no words after the presidential debate Wednesday. She wrote on the Washington Post’s On Faith blog that Barack Obama handed Mitt Romney “the God vote.”
Said Quinn: “When Mitt Romney mentioned the ‘Creator’ in the debate Wednesday, he owned it. ‘We’re all children of the same God,’ he said. That’s about 85 percent of the country he was talking to. That should have been President Obama’s constituency but he let Romney have it as he let Romney have the debate.”
In the rest of her commentary, she gets into how Republicans have tried to “own God” like they once tried to own the flag. You can read it at this link.
The most provocative part, I thought, was her conclusion:
” There was Obama– grim faced, nervous, fumbling his words and wearing his American flag pin — letting Romney, confident and aggressive and in control, roll right over him at every turn. But the God thing clinched it. If Obama wants to win the next debate, he needs to wear God, as much as it offends him to do so, the same way he captured the flag for this one.”
What do you think? Does the president need to “wear God?”
AMY MARTIN, Executive Director, Earth Rhythms; Writer/Editor, Moonlady Media
People fear change. Especially those over 50 who were born at a time when change happened more slowly.
The pace of change these days shakes their confidence in the world. It’s just too much. God is perceived as unchanging.
So if Obama can connect his message to that bedrock, it will help. But he will have to evoke the God of all people beyond the lip service to the idea by Romney, whose actions do not match his “We’re all children of the same God” statement.
Obama will have to delineate how he walks his talk when it comes to extending the grace of God to all, including how extending health care is doing the work of the God, how preserving the Earth’s ecosystem respects the creation of God, and how compassion for the poor and downtrodden is the highest homage to God.
