So, I finally listened to the whole broadcast today (life interrupted blogging — I had to have surgery yesterday) and can finally respond more fully. I also got a chance to read the comments and noticed that we were pretty much in agreement with Obama and that Dobson blew it, except an occasional commenter like ZZ (sorry, ZZ) who thinks that Obama’s comments limit Christians articulating the reason for their position:

Another way to interpret Obama’s words would be: “You religious people haven’t yet given a totally atheistic argument for what you want, so sit down and shut up”. If we WERE to come up with totally secular reasons for everything, he’d probably say “Since there’s a secular argument for everything, why talk about God at all?”

Tetrius’ comment came the closest to my position (not surprising since he is Reformed 🙂

The city of God and the city of man are separate kingdoms. God’s ordained human government to execute temporal justice, and we should vote for people for office who will uphold justice and keep government’s power within its proper sphere.
We have got to eschew the temptation to try to force the kingdom of God on a world dead in sin through the force of law. Law doesn’t regenerate hearts dead in sin! It can only serve to illustrate our sinfulness before a holy God and our helplessness, pointing us to Christ.
I wish Dobson, et al., would spend more time preaching Christ and Him crucified and less time manipulating an imaginary political chessboard.

One of the reasons I started Reformed Chicks was issues like this where a public Christian figure makes a statement that doesn’t reflect my views but is taken as if this is what the Christian right believe. Not everyone who is a conservative Christian holds to Dobson’s view of Christianity or politics. Dobson is not my spokesman and never will be. I’ll speak for myself, thank you very much. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t do so yesterday when it was more timely because of my surgery. I started writing a post but ran out of time before I had to leave for the hospital, so I did what I could and let you guys have first crack at commenting on the story for a change.
I can understand where ZZ is coming from but I don’t think that’s what Obama’s saying at all. I think what he’s saying is that since we live in a pluralistic society we have to be prepared to persuade those who don’t hold our views with other arguments, ones that make sense to them.
We have been abundantly clear on life issues. Who doesn’t know that we believe that abortion is wrong because we believe that life is sacred? Who hasn’t heard the term, “sanctity of human life?” We believe that man was created in the image of God and therefore our life has worth. But if we want to persuade society beyond our own people, then we have to couch the argument in secular language as well, not instead of but in addition to, that’s just common sense. Otherwise we are preaching to the choir and not generating larger support.
As I listened to Dobson I couldn’t help but wonder if he listened to the same speech that I listened to. Dobson distorts Obama’s position when he says this:

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” he asked. “What he’s trying to say here is, unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.
“What the senator is saying there, in essence, is that ‘I can’t seek to pass legislation, for example, that bans partial-birth abortion, because there are people in the culture who don’t see that as a moral issue,’ ” Dobson said. “And if I can’t get everyone to agree with me, than it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. Now, that is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

Obama has never said that religion shouldn’t be part of the public debate. According to Jim Wallis:

Contrary to Dobson’s charge, Obama was very strong in defending the right and necessity of people of faith bringing their moral agenda to the public square, and was specifically critical of many on the left and in his own Democratic Party for being uncomfortable with religion in politics.
Obama said that religion is and has always been a fundamental and absolutely essential source of morality for the nation, but also said that “religion has no monopoly on morality,”

It was at Wallis’ event that Obama gave the speech that Dobson found so offensive.
And I know that Dobson had a problem with this:

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

But his response was another distortion of Obama’s position by claiming that Obama thinks he’s a religious authority and is distorting the Bible:

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Dobson said, adding that Obama is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

Obama is clearly just using these as examples of how hard it is to use the Bible to set public policy. Making this a test of Obama’s biblical understanding is ludicrous.
Obama’s response to Dobson’s comments:

“Someone would be pretty hard pressed to make that argument,” he told reporters aboard his campaign plane. “It is a speech that affirms the role of faith not just in my life but in the life of the American people, that suggests that we make a mistake by trying to push faith out of the public square.”
“I do make the argument that it’s important for folks like myself, who think faith is important, that we try to translate some of our concerns into universal language so we can have open and vigorous debate rather than having religion divide us,” Obama said. “And I do suggest that the separation of church and state is important. But there’s no, no theological work being done in that speech in terms of the Bible.”

He also told ABC News:

“I have no idea what he’s referring to. Anybody who’s read that speech will tell you that I extol the need for people with religious faith to express their views in the public square, and I don’t interpret the Bible in the ways he’s referring to,” Obama said.
“Either he didn’t read the speech or he’s just trying to score political points, and either way, I don’t think it’s a particularly useful way to talk about these issues”

Obama is right to try to move the discussion beyond religious terms since this is not a Christian nation, there is no such thing as a Christian nation and Christians more than anyone else should understand that fact because Christ told us his kingdom is not of this world:

ESV John 18:36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

BTW, just an aside but Jesus doesn’t sound like much of a pacifist here, does he?