Rick Warren is no progressive:

On Meet the Press today, the featured guests are Jon Meacham and pastor Rick Warren. Some people have the impression that Warren is a progressive, and it is true that he's not as conservative as James Dobson, Gary Bauer, et al. But he's pretty conservative none the less.

From Wikipedia:

• Warren made the claim that he is ... a good friend of President Bush and most of the top Generals at the Pentagon in an email to WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah.
• Warren said he is Rupert Murdoch's pastor ...

From CNN: (via Think Progress)

Warren is entirely orthodox when it comes to the culture wars: Like other evangelicals, he

• opposes abortion,
• [opposes] gay marriage,
• [opposes] stem-cell research,
• [opposes] human cloning,
• and [opposes] euthanasia.

What's more, on the eve of last year's Presidential election, he wrote that those five moral issues are "nonnegotiable" and "not even debatable." Leaving no doubt about his political leanings--Bush allied himself with evangelicals on all those issues--Warren urged pastors to "encourage every Christian you know to vote" and "pray for godly leaders to be elected."

From Slate:

[The Virginia Episcopal] churches' [decided] to align with controversial Archbishop Akinola [of Nigeria] - someone whom even many conservatives in the church have serious qualms about. He's called homosexuality a "satanic attack" on the church and considers gay-affirming churches to be a "cancerous lump" in the body of Christ. He has endorsed the implementation of anti-gay legislation in his country that would ban homosexuals from having relationships and practically eliminate their right to free speech, all at risk of imprisonment ...

Elsewhere, he compared homosexuality and lesbianism to bestiality. He also made an earlier statement this year that was tied to ensuing violence against Muslims in his community; while American mega-pastor Rick Warren was deftly defending Akinola, people in Nigeria, including another bishop, were decrying it.

From Rick Warren's defense in Time:

Akinola has the strength of a lion, useful in confronting Third World fundamentalism and First World relativism. He has been criticized for recent remarks of frustration that some felt exacerbated Muslim-Christian clashes in his country. But Christians are routinely attacked in parts of Nigeria, and his anger was no more characteristic than Nelson Mandela's apartheid-era statement that "sooner or later this violence is going to spread to whites." I believe he, like Mandela, is a man of peace and his leadership is a model for Christians around the world.

posted by Quiddity at 12/24/2006 08:14:00 AM