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Rick Warren was invited to give an
address to TED in February 2006. Time Magazine had recently identified
Rick Warren as a veritable god of popular religion and wisdom, so I thought
I'd better check it out.
Not that I hadn't checked out
"Purpose Driven Life".... I tried. I couldn't finish it. I
couldn't find the content. It was the kind of sustained generic common
sense which, devoid of any specific application, can never be proven wrong.
Be yourself. Have patience. Set goals. Plan ahead.
Was there something remarkable in this book that I missed? Are there
really millions of people out there who don't have any purpose? Will
any of them, really, acquire one by reading this book?
Warren makes the stunning
assertion that he doesn't know a single pastor who is "in it for the money".
That's a stereotype, he says, but it's not true. That's amazing.
He doesn't think pastors draw a salary anywhere? He doesn't believe
that deep down within their presumptive souls it never occurred to most
pastors that they could get paid to talk?
I leave alone for the moment the
outrageousness of it all, but either he's right and all those exposé's about preachers living in hugely
expensive mansions or driving around in limousines or wearing expensive
designer clothes are false.... or he's being incredibly disingenuous.
Either "Elmer Gantry" is a fraud or Warren is. Either Jim Bakker is a
shocking aberration or he just happened to get caught. Either John
Hagee is just covering his expenses or he is living very, very well.
Either Dobson has bodyguards or he doesn't. Either Rick Warren himself
has bodyguards or he doesn't.
Warren traveled to Syria in 2006
and made several statements afterwards that appeared to praise Assad's
regime there as tolerant and moderate. I get that Warren believes he
can personally negotiate world peace, but I also get that he, like Billy
Graham, may be naive, and may be in the process of allowing himself to be
used by shrewd politicians. What does he get out of it? Well,
gosh, just read his stuff. Like
Rev. James Dobson, he loves to name-drop. Even worse, when taken
to task by Joseph Farah, one of the fanatics at
WorldNetDaily, for his comments, Warren appeared to
misrepresent himself-- to put it generously. Then he accused Farah of
being Satan's proxy. Then he apologized to Farah. (Farah, by the way,
is far more scary than Warren will ever be, and almost as scary as Dobson
but not quite as scary--or comical--as John Hagee).
It is a little difficult to
believe that any preacher presenting a message, nowadays, that is genuinely
biblical, and transforming in a spiritual sense, would be invited to speak
at the NBA all-star game. The organizers of the NBA all-star game are
not going to invite someone to speak who seems to hold exotic values.
They won't invite someone who believes that sports are not really all that
important, that success is not about winning, that trinkets and souvenirs
won't buy you happiness.
Warren claims that he wants
evangelicals to stop voting for candidates based on single, "wedge" issues
like abortion. He wants us to believe that he is more sophisticated
and mature than that-- he thinks the environment is also important, and
poverty. So Warren hosts Obama and McCain this year-- separately--
claiming to be non-partisan, but in 2004, he issued a "toolbox" for pastors
which urged them to urge their church members to consider abortion as the
only non-negotiable moral value in the election. So Warren wants to
sound objective and enlightened and a little more sophisticated... but he
ends up with the same position as Pat Robertson, who doesn't drive around in
a limousine, don't you know.
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