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Presidental Debate to be Held at Mega-Church
Is this against separation of church and state?
| quote: | At Church, a Public Meeting for Obama and McCain
LAKE FOREST, Calif. — It will be the handshake shown around the world.
Saturday night at about 9 p.m. Eastern time (6 p.m. Pacific), Senators Barack Obama and John McCain will briefly cross paths for the first time in the presidential campaign (the Senate floor doesn’t count, and besides, neither one has been there much lately).
The encounter, at the Saddleback Valley Community Church, an evangelical megachurch here in Orange County, will mark the unofficial opening of the general election and serve as a prequel to the fall debates as the two candidates discuss, although not simultaneously, a range of faith-related, character, leadership and humanitarian issues.
The two-hour session will be produced by the church itself and carried live on CNN, CSPAN, FOX, MSNBC and Daystar, a Christian television network, and live-streamed on the Internet by, among others, the church (saddlebackcivilforum.com) and Readers Digest (readersdigest.com).
Watching from inside the church will be 550 members of the news media.
The event reflects the importance of religion in American life and, increasingly, in politics. It also marks the coming of age of a broader brand of evangelicalism that is more socially minded and diverse than the orthodox religious movement of the Christian right.
At center stage will be the Rev. Rick Warren, a Southern Baptist pastor and author of “The Purpose-Driven Life,” who embodies the changing of the guard from such traditionalist figures as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
Mr. Warren will first interview Mr. Obama for an hour (with commercial breaks). Afterward, Mr. McCain is to come on stage. The two candidates are to shake hands. Then Mr. Obama leaves while Mr. McCain has his own hour with Mr. Warren. During Mr. Obama’s session, Mr. McCain will not be able to hear the questions or answers and will be asked more or less the same ones.
The body language of the two candidates when they meet will be closely monitored. They have been lobbing insults at each other long distance for weeks now, but any encounter in person here that is less than cordial would come as a surprise. This is not a debate with partisans cheering from the sidelines; it is a sanctuary. Game face is not only not required, it is discouraged.
Mr. Warren, who personally arranged the meeting through cellphone calls to the candidates, both of whom he knows, said in a statement that his conversations would focus on how they make decisions and what kind of leaders they would be.
“Leadership involves far more than promoting programs and making speeches, and since no one can predict what crises will happen over the next four years, it is vital to know the decision capacity and process of each man,” he said. He also said he wanted to avoid “partisan ‘gotcha’ questions that typically produce heat instead of light.”
Reflecting the broad nature of his church beyond traditional religious issues, Mr. Warren said he plans to raise questions about poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights.
Mr. Obama has demonstrated a comfort level in religious spheres, while Mr. McCain rarely expresses his religious views in public. Mr. Obama also has an extensive religious outreach program, and polls show that he leads Mr. McCain among most religious denominations, with the notable exception of evangelicals.
For them, abortion remains a crucial question, and Mr. Warren has indicated that he would raise it. Both candidates have some explaining to do to their political bases — Mr. Obama favors abortion rights but has made statements recently that have worried purists; Mr. McCain, who has long opposed abortion rights, indicated in an interview with the Weekly Standard that he would consider picking a vice president who favors abortion rights, reviving doubts about him among social conservatives.
Mr. Warren, who consulted with several others about the kinds of questions he might ask, has also received lots of unsolicited advice from the blogosphere, much of it about abortion. But Mr. Warren’s ministry has made a name for itself by broadening its concerns beyond such issues, to the displeasure of some traditional evangelicals who say he is diluting the movement. How much he dwells on abortion tonight could signal the degree to which the movement is changing.
The event is being produced by the church in part because the candidates did not want it to be sponsored by a television network or moderated by a journalist, according to Whitney Kelley, a spokeswoman for the church.
Their other criteria, she said, included that Mr. Warren be the sole questioner, without a panel and without questions from the audience.
The church, the fourth-largest in the country with a membership of 22,000, seats 3,000 people. But it had to remove 1,000 seats to accommodate the media and its production crew and to provide a security buffer between the audience and the stage, Ms. Kelley said.
The church polled its members to determine whether to charge for the remaining seats to help recoup its costs, expected to run into hundreds of thousands of dollars (just like a presidential debate). The members agreed, and the ticket price was set at $100 each. Ticket preferences were given to charter members of the church, which held its first service in 1980, and to its volunteers; each campaign will also have a block of seats.
But even the $200,000 from ticket sales will “fall short” of the final price tag, said Mark Affleck, executive director of Saddleback’s Peace Plan, a program to help position the Christian church as a leader in relief and developmental work around the world.
The church takes in about $27 million a year in tithes and offerings.
Mr. Affleck said that Saddleback’s goal in staging this event is “to restore the church’s primacy in society and not be off on the sidelines, to be a part of the world and all the issues.” He added: “It’s a way to use the platform that God has given Rick and the church to be a leader and bring everyone together, not have the church be over there and separate.”
Reflecting the mainstream quality of the event, there will be commercial breaks. Each candidate is to speak for three segments of 11 minutes each and one segment of 12 minutes.
One of those commercials will be from a Christian group, the Matthew 25 Network, which has endorsed Mr. Obama.
And in a taste of things to come, Bob Barr, who is running for president as a libertarian, has protested his exclusion from the event. A federal district court has ruled that the church did not have to let him participate. Mr. Barr is likely to raise the same issue with the commission on presidential debates. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/u...saddleback.html
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