On Friday’s broadcast of PBS’s “Newshour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks reacted to President Barack Obama’s prayer breakfast speech with a defense of it.
According to Brooks, Obama’s speech was an effort “urge” humility about the Christian faith, which he called admirable.
“I think, if the president had come as an atheist to attack religion and to attack Christianity, the Republicans would have a point,” Brooks said. “That’s not what a president should be doing. But that’s not how he came. He has used that prayer breakfast year after year to talk about his own faith, his own faith journey, his own struggles. He’s used it — he has come as a Christian.”
“And the things he said were things — I have never met a Christian who disagreed with what he issued, that the religion has been perverted, that we have to walk humbly before the face of the lord, that God’s purposes are mysterious to us,” he continued. “This is not like some tangential, weird belief. This is at the core of every Christian’s faith and every Jew’s faith. And so what he said was utterly normal and admirable and a recognition of historical fact and an urge towards some humility. And so I thought the protests were manufactured and falsely manufactured.”
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