On converting Tiger Woods

Brit Hume issued an altar call to Tiger Woods, and Keith Olbermann took him to the woodshed for it:

Jonathan called my attention to this on Facebook, snarking, "Keith Olbermann just said Christians should keep their religion out of the public sphere. I'm so glad Martin Luther King didn't believe that!"

True, the Civil Rights Movement was a "faith-based initiative." True, the Left tends to conveniently forget this truth, just as the Right tends to forget King's strong opposition to the Vietnam War and equally strong commitment to eradicating poverty. I do have some sympathy with the snark, but there seems to be a world of difference between King and Brit Hume.

King deeply mined the biblical traditions of Exodus and the ethics of neighborly love and turning the other cheek, but he hitched those resources to the techniques of non-violent social action he learned from a Hindu. The genius of the conclusion of his I Have a Dream speech is the way he brought the language of African-American Christianity into the public square in a profoundly non-sectarian way:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

King, unlike Hume, didn't ask Jews to become Christians before they joined hands with him in his liberation project. He appealed to all Americans to more deeply live into the best of their religious and civic traditions.

What's so obviously wrong with Hume's statement is that Buddhism, a religion devoted to detachment from worldly concerns, probably does have resources one can mine in order to leave behind a lifestyle of serial adultery. This is Don Imus' point in the above segment, and that it falls to someone like Imus to properly diagnose and prescribe cures for Woods' sins says something about the sad shape we're in. 

Hume could have talked about detachment (which is also Christian language, from our mystical tradition), about repentance (a concept which Christians don't have a monopoly on), or heck, about any number of things, and in so doing bring Christianity into the public square without pitting one religion against another. We don't live in Calvin's Geneva, or Puritan New England, and the keepers of the public square, with the consent of a good portion of the governed, simply don't view it as their task to adjudicate between competing claims for ultimate truth. Put differently, there is a difference between journalism and the 700 Club, but Fox News is blurring that distinction.

That said, I found myself exasperated to no end with Olbermann and his guest Dan Savage. It seems a willed misunderstanding of Hume to cast him as an antinomian in order to score points about the hypocrisy of the family values party. And when Savage asks, "Where are the moderate and liberal Christians who are willing to condemn Hume's on-air proselytizing?" well, isn't that a question for Olbermann? He could have booked one of them for his show instead of the lapsed Catholic and one-time seminarian Savage.  

Which gives me a great excuse to put this up, which basically explains why I don't watch Olbermann all that much:

Comments

[Jonathan Marlowe]

True - there is a big difference between Britt Hume and Martin Luther King.

But Olbermann's blanket statements, like 'keep religion out of public discussions' does not recognize the distinctions- and they render the Civil Rights Movement unintelligible, which is something worth considering as we approach MLK's birthday.

To me, the interesting question is not "should we bring Christianity into public discussions?" but "is the Christianity we are bringing into public discussions faithful?" (I realize that's what I'm interested in, but not what Olbermann is interested in. Since Olbermann isn't interested in Christianity, maybe he just shouldn't comment on it. Kind of like I don't comment on organic chemistry). It would be all right with me if Britt Hume didn't comment on it either, just like I don't comment on organic chemistry. But I'm not saying that I don't comment on organic chemistry because it is private, I'm saying I don't comment on organic chemistry because I don't know the first thing about it.

Great video!

[Lee]

I'll freely admit that I couldn't bring myself to watch any of these videos, so take this with a grain of salt, but it occurs to me that one problem with Hume's remarks is that he wasn't actually calling Woods to convert, he was trying to score culture war points. You don't evangelize someone by calling them out on cable TV. If Hume was a personal friend of Woods and approached his evangelism in a confidential one-on-one conversation it would be different. Of course, then he wouldn't be able to engage in self-righteous preening in front of the entire country.

(Not that it's at all clear to me that Christians are, on average, better at avoiding adultery than other people.)