{"id":954,"date":"2009-07-02T09:16:57","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T09:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/07\/at-least-mark-sanford-vs-david.html"},"modified":"2009-07-02T09:16:57","modified_gmt":"2009-07-02T09:16:57","slug":"at-least-mark-sanford-vs-david","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/07\/at-least-mark-sanford-vs-david.html","title":{"rendered":"Check Out the Tan Lines on that Bathsheba (Mark Sanford vs. King David)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/imgs\/bathsheba.gif\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"bathsheba.gif\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/128\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/07\/bathsheba-thumb-600x369-6175.gif\" width=\"600\" height=\"369\" class=\"mt-image-center\" style=\"text-align: center;margin: 0 auto 20px\" \/><\/a><\/span>Most religious conservative politicians who get caught in a sex scandal make Adam their friend. Because he took the bite of that apple, long before there were hookers or F.B.I. stings, he insured that we were &#8220;all sinners.&#8221; Christ came along later to absolve us of our sins but didn&#8217;t change the basic human nature.<br \/>\nThough they never quite say it, a politician who invokes the &#8220;I am a sinner&#8221; language is subtly implying: a) there&#8217;s nothing especially unusual about what I did and therefore I needn&#8217;t be punished severely, if at all. b) &#8220;Let he who is free of sin cast the first stone,&#8221; which is to say, don&#8217;t judge me harshly, since you&#8217;re just as bad.<br \/>\nJesus never suggested that being cleansed of spiritual sin meant you were exempted from temporal punishment.<br \/>\nThe problem with this is that Jesus never suggested that being cleansed of spiritual sin meant you were exempted from temporal punishment. A murderer who accepts Christ might still get to heaven, but he doesn&#8217;t get sprung from Leavenworth.<br \/>\nMark Sanford complicated matters by adding a new biblical metaphor: David, who became a great King, despite performing one of the most odious acts in the Bible, sending Uriah to the front to be killed, so he could snag Bathsheba. The message: you can behave horribly and still have a good political career.<br \/>\nRabbi David Wolpe argues that this analogy is &#8220;as inapt as it is self-serving.&#8221; Far from being given a pass, he notes, King David was condemned by the Prophet Nathan for abuse of power. David begged mercy from God, who ultimately allowed for David to continue in leadership.<br \/>\nBut Rabbi Wolpe points out that David was operating in a theocracy, under which God is the ultimate Decider. In a democracy, though, that power of forgiveness rests with voters. Unless Mr. Sanford can offer substantial proof &#8212; perhaps a YouTube video? &#8212; that God is thinking of him in the same way he did David, voters may be more inclined to side with the Prophet Nathan.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/07\/01\/god-and-mark-sanford\/\">crossposted at The New York Times forum<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most religious conservative politicians who get caught in a sex scandal make Adam their friend. Because he took the bite of that apple, long before there were hookers or F.B.I. stings, he insured that we were &#8220;all sinners.&#8221; Christ came along later to absolve us of our sins but didn&#8217;t change the basic human nature.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Check Out the Tan Lines on that Bathsheba (Mark Sanford vs. King David) - Steven Waldman<\/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\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/07\/at-least-mark-sanford-vs-david.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Check Out the Tan Lines on that Bathsheba (Mark Sanford vs. King David) - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Most religious conservative politicians who get caught in a sex scandal make Adam their friend. Because he took the bite of that apple, long before there were hookers or F.B.I. stings, he insured that we were &#8220;all sinners.&#8221; Christ came along later to absolve us of our sins but didn&#8217;t change the basic human nature.&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/07\/at-least-mark-sanford-vs-david.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-07-02T09:16:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/files\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/07\/bathsheba-thumb-600x369-6175.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"swaldman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Check Out the Tan Lines on that Bathsheba (Mark Sanford vs. King David) - Steven Waldman","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/07\/at-least-mark-sanford-vs-david.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Check Out the Tan Lines on that Bathsheba (Mark Sanford vs. King David) - Steven Waldman","og_description":"Most religious conservative politicians who get caught in a sex scandal make Adam their friend. 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and many others.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/author\/swaldman"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}