David van Biema in Time.com has just posted a very interesting article: The Real Losers in the Obama-Warren Controversy.

He says, “Rick Warren’s invitation to have Barack Obama speak at his mega-church’s AIDS conference has sparked a furor in the evangelical community. But pro-life critics of Obama’s inclusion may end up regretting their stance.”

Also:

The last thing that political evangelicalism should do is play the fundamentalist to Warren’s Graham. There are those like David Kuo, the former second-in-command at George W. Bush’s faith-based office who expressed his frustrations in the recent book Tempting Faith, who feel that, as he puts it, “there is one camp [in Evangelicalism] who truly want to follow Jesus, and another, much narrower, the Christian political power brokers, who want to follow conservative politics.” He thinks the latter will soon be exposed to the majority as wordly operators rather than God’s servants and shrivel away. He regards some of Warren’s more prominent critics this week as prime examples.

If those critics want to hang on a little longer… or for that matter, if they want to prove Kuo wrong both in his assessment and his prediction… or if they’d simply like to live up to the full meaning of their pro-life commitment, they might consider letting Warren host Obama in peace. Otherwise, more broad-minded Christians may eventually demand a different kind of leadership.