Obama's Three-front Battle.

Ed Kilgore (a veteran political operative and fellow Episcopalian) at New Donkey has his take on the speech the other day. I'm not sure why I am so hung up on this. I guess I am just glad we progressives are finally talking about faith and not relegating it to the right to fill the void. Here's Ed's description of what Obama is fighting:

In other words, Obama was fighting something of a three-front battle in this speech:
(1) against conservative claims that God's Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;
(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;
(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture.

And his bottom line:

This is an enormous potential political constituency that is waiting to hear from Our Side, not with Conservative Lite policy prescriptions; not with Christian Left counter-prophetic-absolutism; but with credible and authentic appeals to the holy fear that the faithful should respect when confronting those who make exclusive claims to represent God's Will on Earth.