Obama appoints Pawlenty’s pastor to faith council
Monday, February 07, 2011 at 8:17 am
- 15 Comments
President Obama named a dozen faith leaders to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships on Friday, and two of them hail from Minnesota. Leith Anderson of the National Association of Evangelicals, who is also Tim Pawlenty’s pastor, was appointed by Obama, as was fellow Minnesota Bishop Mark Hanson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The council, formerly known under President Bush as the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, has had a healthy number of Minnesotans under Obama.
Anderson has been the head of the NAE since 2006, and he’s been the pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie since 1977. Pawlenty’s wife Mary has been a long-time member of Wooddale, and Tim Pawlenty joined the church after the two married in the late-1980s.
Anderson has been seen as a moderate evangelical, eager to find agreement on issues with both sides of the political aisle. In early December, the NEA released a survey outlining 18 policy positions on which Obama and evangelicals agree.
“In the current political climate, many focus their energy on fueling issues of disagreement – people of faith included,” Anderson said at the time. “But, I find it really interesting that evangelical leaders readily look for where we can agree and support.”
Obama also appointed ELCA Bishop Mark Hanson, who has been serving as the presiding bishop since 2001. He oversaw a contentious assembly meeting in Minneapolis in 2008 where the church voted to allow congregations to have gay and lesbian pastors in committed relationships.
And earlier this year, Hanson appeared in a video urging an and to anti-LGBT bullying as part of the It Gets Better campaign.
The response to his video was strong on both sides of the debate over homosexuality within Christianity.
“This is an evangelical moment given to us like none other,” Hanson said in a statement about the controversy, “because we live in a culture where most people see the Christian witness as an obsession with drawing lines in the sand and expending enormous energies defining who is on the right side of that line and who is on the rejected side. We know from the biblical witness, however, to beware of drawing lines in the sand, because Jesus is going to be standing on both sides of the line of the sand. For that, he got nailed to a cross.”
Currently serving on Obama’s faith council is Minnesotan Peg Chemberlin who is the president of the National Council of Churches and executive director of the Minnesota Council of Churches. Her term is set to expire this year.
In addition to the Minnesotans on the list, Obama also appointed the Reverend Elder Nancy L. Wilson of the Metropolitan Community Churches, a Christian denomination that sprang out of the LGBT community.
Follow Andy Birkey on Twitter15 Comments
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 9:22 am
shouldn’t a government “faith council” be unconstitutional?
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 9:29 am
November’s election taught Obama that he’d better start acting more republican if he knows what’s good for his re-election chances.
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 1:07 pm
Dennis,
So you are saying that only Republicans deserve to be in office? Wouldn’t that be more like a totalitarian and not a democracy?
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 2:30 pm
I’d like to be an observer in just one of those meetings… assuming everyone was present. My guess is they’d be congenial. It’s only us (individuals) that yell and name call — it makes us feel better. (like calling someone an idiot )
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 3:01 pm
Chad,
Republicans do, actually believe – and have for 30 years – that they deserve a dictatorship – er, “permanent Republican majority.”
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 4:03 pm
“Wouldn’t that be more like a totalitarian and not a democracy?”
No, totalitarianism would be like forcing people to buy health insurance when they don’t want to, telling employers who they will hire and what wages they will pay, telling people what lightbulbs they will use, that they can’t smoke in bars, forcing people to wear helmets on motorcycles and wear seat belts in cars, etc. You know, all the things the democrats make you do when they run government.
That’s totalitarian.
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 4:48 pm
Because god-forbid our government actually tries to protect us from death…
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 6:45 pm
No one is preventing Dennis from not wearing his seat belt, but we’ll be sure to send out for help and bring him to the nearest emergency room whether or not he’s been paying taxes and has health insurance. That’s “totalitarianism” for you. Sheesh!
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 7:15 pm
The reason why anti-vaccination movements are on the rise is because we are three generations removed from having to attend, as grade schoolers, funerals for classmates who died of measles. And the reason why the conservative movement is currently ascendent is the same thing: We are (or were in 1980) three generations removed from the worst depradations of capitalism. We have now reached a point where the disenfranchised outnumber those who benefit from Dennis’s system. People agitate for the relaxation of regulations when they have forgotten how they benefit from those regulations. We are in the midst of learning a hard societal lesson about the necessity of regulations and rules that protect us from the unscrupulous – and some, mostly manipulated by those same unscrupulous, are rejecting that lesson.
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 8:47 pm
You either believe in a free society or you believe in a controlled society.
It’s no coincidence that it’s the nanny statists of the mommy party who are obsessed with safety and security like some over-bearing mother following her toddler around with a wash cloth lest he fall and get dirty, is supported overwhelmingly (60%+) by women (and males of the testosterone-challenged variety).
Comment posted February 7, 2011 @ 9:12 pm
Dennis
Perhaps you can find a cultural island somewhere where your form of society will flourish – Shelter Island comes to mind. Go there now…
Comment posted February 8, 2011 @ 11:19 am
Conservatives love privatizing the social safety net because it means that they can make any sort of help for people dependent on swallowing their BS hook, line and sinker. If you look at what’s going on, none of it is about any definition of freedom I’m comfortable with – it’s all in the name of making sure that a hyper-conservative, wasteful, destructive, exploitive, discriminatory way of life is encoded into law before the aging Baby Boomers – the oldest of whom are now pushing 70 – drop off the face of the planet and don’t have to deal with the chaos that their hedonism, self-worship and lust for money has caused.
As a wise friend of mine observes, “in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max future, you are not the guy with the leather jacket and cool bike – you’re random skull #431 in his throne.” Civilization is good, people.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
