Word: warrens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Warren would say there is no tension between his goals, that he never pretended to be anything other than a conservative. It's not his fault, after all, if people forget that he is a theologically conservative Southern Baptist whose concern about issues like abortion and gay marriage has not been displaced by a recent focus on certain progressive causes...
...there has always been the other Rick Warren, who sounds for all the world like the new leader of the Religious Right. The one who proclaimed a week before the 2004 election that the five "non-negotiable issues" for Christian voters were abortion, gay marriage, human cloning, euthanasia and stem-cell research. The one who bragged about taking Obama and other Democrats to task over abortion but said he "didn't have the opportunity" to ever talk with George W. Bush about his opposition to torture. (See TIME's cover story "The Global Ambition of Rick Warren...
...short, Warren wants to be both the universally admired pastor who speaks to the nation and the influential leader who mobilizes religious conservatives for political ends. But those are two inherently conflicting roles, and he cannot be both, no matter how hard he tries...
...Warren himself encourages the confusion about his politics and agenda. When the Saddleback presidential forum was announced in July 2008, the pastor seemed eager to emphasize that he was not an old-school Evangelical leader obsessed with social issues. "There is no Christian religious test," he told TIME in the days before the event, vowing that questions would center on four areas: poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights. On the night of the forum, however, Warren hewed closely to a conservative script, asking the candidates about gay marriage, judges and abortion, and only briefly touching on poverty and climate...
...next day at Saddleback's Sunday services, Warren tried to reclaim his postpartisan reputation, telling his congregants that he would not endorse a presidential candidate nor tell anyone whom he was going to vote for. But that same day, he gave an interview to Naomi Schaeffer Riley of the Wall Street Journal that left very few questions about his leanings. The Democratic Party's new platform calling for a reduction in the abortion rate was, he said, "window dressing" and "too little, too late." When Riley asked Warren about some of Obama's Evangelical supporters, he dismissed the significance...