No religion, however liberal, can do without  the concept of heresy (nor can a political party). Heresy is simply the drawing of lines. As ever, though, the galling thing is that the liberal mind so often draws stark and uncompromising lines while concealing from itself its own line-drawing and heretic-hunting. This is why whenever I see one of those COEXIST bumper stickers, I assume that the person driving that car imagines herself to be a paragon of religious tolerance, but is in fact as dogmatic and as humorless a religious liberal as you can imagine.

If Democrats are pushing conservative Christians further away from them and into the arms of the GOP — see here for more on this point — then Ed Kilgore says conservative Christians are pushing liberals out of Christianity. He takes as his example opinions expressed by a conservative radio talker, as well as a NASCAR driver:

And even at this year’s breakfast, the message of the “non-controversial” keynote speaker, NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip, was a very blunt contradiction of the president’s injunction to humility about religious truth:

If you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you don’t have a relationship [with Him], if He’s not the master of your life, if you’ve never gotten on your knees and asked Him to forgive you of your sins, [and] you’re just a pretty good guy or a pretty good gal, you’re going to go to Hell.Not much holy doubt in that mind, is there?

I find myself halfway between Waltrip and Obama. From the president’s remarks at the Prayer Breakfast:

So this is not unique to one group or one religion.  There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.  In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try.  And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.

And, first, we should start with some basic humility.  I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments.  And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process.  And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty.  No God condones terror.  No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.

And so, as people of faith, we are summoned to push back against those who try to distort our religion — any religion — for their own nihilistic ends.  And here at home and around the world, we will constantly reaffirm that fundamental freedom — freedom of religion — the right to practice our faith how we choose, to change our faith if we choose, to practice no faith at all if we choose, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.

I do not have the capability to peer inside the president’s soul and judge whether or not he’s a “real” Christian. If he is a Christian, he is very far from an orthodox one, but honestly, I don’t much care. He’s the commander-in-chief, not the pastor-in-chief. I would rather have an atheist president who was committed for whatever reason to protecting religious liberty and advancing policies that served the common good than a Christian president who was eager to get the nation into a war, or whose liberal Christianity made him more enemy than ally of religious liberty for Christians like me.

I think Obama was historically ignorant and politically ill-advised to bring the Crusades into the discussion, for reasons we have discussed in this space (in short, because the historical phenomenon is far too complex to be shoehorned into a neat, politically useful narrative). Nevertheless, he was certainly right to say that no religion has a monopoly on virtue or vice, and to call for all of us to be more humble and loving. What’s most interesting about his speech, though, is how he assumes that his watery, secular-ish liberal take on religion (both Christian and otherwise) is the authentic religious stance.

How do we know who is “misusing His name,” and who is being true to their faith? How do we know that faith is being “perverted and distorted”? By whose standards? When we say that “no God condones terror,” what does that mean to the jihadist who believes in all sincerity that he is not engaged in terror, but is simply being obedient to his god?

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