{"id":65,"date":"2008-08-13T11:22:44","date_gmt":"2008-08-13T11:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/dear-rick-would-you-ask-barack.html"},"modified":"2008-08-13T11:22:44","modified_gmt":"2008-08-13T11:22:44","slug":"dear-rick-would-you-ask-barack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/dear-rick-would-you-ask-barack.html","title":{"rendered":"Dear Rick: Would you ask Barack and John about…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Rick<\/span>This weekend’s main event, outside of the Beijing Olympics, will be the Saturday sit-down between superpastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback megachurch<\/a> and Barack Obama and John McCain–and event being called “the Saddleback Civil Forum<\/a>.” Rick will have an hour with each man to talk about faith and how their faith would affect their agendas should they be elected president. <\/p>\n

This is an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, role for a clergyman, and a remarkable moment for the campaign and American politics. Nothing like this has happened before, and so it’s natural that Pastor Rick would need some help formulating questions.<\/p>\n

And speaking of the Olympics, here is what I’d like to see Warren ask McCain and Obama:<\/p>\n

\n

Gentlemen: You have both proclaimed yourselves men of faith whose beliefs inform the way you would govern the United States. But I’d like to know what would you do to promote religious freedom overseas for people of faith who are suffering–Tibetan Buddhists at the hands of the Chinese, for example, or as many as 100 million Christians in China and elsewhere, especially in Sudan and many Muslim countries. <\/p>\n

This October marks the 10th anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act<\/a>, or IRFA, which was signed into law by none other than Bill Clinton. To the dismay of many of us, George Bush has not been able to use that act to advance international religious freedom nearly as much as we had hoped. In fact, his muted reaction to the Chinese crackdown in Tibet amid his trip to Beijing for the Olympics underscored his mixed record. <\/p>\n

Polls, like a May 2008 survey<\/a> commissioned by Open Doors USA<\/a>, show this is an issue of vital concern to Americans, especially believers. Would you do anything different? And if so, what? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\"McCain<\/span>FYI: For indispensible background reading, check out David van Biema’s superb profile, “The Global Ambition of Rick Warren,”<\/a> in the recent issue of TIME magazine. And for further reference, check out the brief essays on faith by each candidate, also in TIME. John McCain’s “A Light Amid the Darkness,”<\/a> and Barack Obama’s “Changing Hearts and Minds.”<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend’s main event, outside of the Beijing Olympics, will be the Saturday sit-down between superpastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback megachurch and Barack Obama and John McCain–and event being called “the Saddleback Civil Forum.” Rick will have an hour with each man to talk about faith and how their faith would affect their agendas…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,12,1,13,18,9,26],"tags":[59,6,5,57,58],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhist","category-catholics","category-election-08","category-evangelicals","category-international-relations","category-religion-in-the-public-square","category-war","tag-international-religious-freedom","tag-mccain","tag-obama","tag-rick-warren","tag-saddleback"],"yoast_head":"\nDear Rick: Would you ask Barack and John about... - Progressive Revival<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/dear-rick-would-you-ask-barack.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dear Rick: Would you ask Barack and John about... - Progressive Revival\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This weekend’s main event, outside of the Beijing Olympics, will be the Saturday sit-down between superpastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback megachurch and Barack Obama and John McCain–and event being called “the Saddleback Civil Forum.” Rick will have an hour with each man to talk about faith and how their faith would affect their agendas…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/2008\/08\/dear-rick-would-you-ask-barack.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Progressive Revival\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-08-13T11:22:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/progressiverevival\/files\/import\/imgs\/Rick%20Warren.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Gibson\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Dear Rick: Would you ask Barack and John about... - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/progressiverevival\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}