Considering Rick Warren’s Economic Principles

America’s most famous megachurch pastor Rick Warren has gotten backlash in the Prospect, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, and other places in response to an interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper where he shared his views on President Obama’s campaign for economic “fairness” in tax policy and how the government should help the poor. For what it’s worth, Warren gives 90% of his income away to charity and his church does a lot of ministries with the poor in their community. There’s no question that Warren is committed to helping the poor, though he disagrees with liberals as to who should help the poor and how. The question is whether Warren’s ideological presumptions square with reality and Biblical principles.

Opportunistic “persecution”

Normally on Fridays I don’t write anything on my blog because I’m hard at work on my sermon. But the whole contraception quagmire has gotten me too churned up to focus. There are countries in our world right now where Christians are actually being murdered for their religious beliefs. This is particularly the case in Egypt, where the Coptic Christians are being brutally attacked by Muslim lynch-mobs. It is profoundly disrespectful to the genuine martyrdom that these Christians suffer when American evangelical celebrities like Rick Warren try to fan the flames of our government’s contraception debate for politically opportunistic reasons. And it’s abominable for recent Dietrich Bonhoeffer biographer Eric Metaxas to try to make an analogy between contraception and the Holocaust.