Gene Robinson calls it a “slap in the face.”
“I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” Bishop Robinson said, “but we’re not talking about a discussion, we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
Bishop Robinson knows something about controversy, being content to drive a wedge through the Anglican Communion to satisfy his own sense of entitlement. He celebrated the slap in the face he delivered to the worldwide church in order to become the Right Openly Gay Bishop of New Hampshire.
But he apparently considers the slap he delivered to the rest of the communion well deserved. And when it is not Robinson’s ox being gored, he preaches that others must be tolerant. Here is Robinson discussing the subject from his perspective:
By the time I went to college [at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.], I found that not only were my questions tolerated, but applauded. I was generously and hospitably welcomed into the religious community there and helped with my journey. I had an assistant chaplain there who, when I was ranting and raving about how much of the Nicene Creed I didn’t believe, encouraged me to just drop out when I got to a phrase that I didn’t believe. And participate in however much of it I did feel comfortable with.
And I [thought], a religion that can be that undefensive about itself is the place for me. I gradually said more and more of the Nicene Creed until I did believe it. I found [the Episcopal Church] to be this amazing community where people were not afraid to use their minds, where people were not afraid to read and believe the scriptures, and did not seem to be forcing on anyone else its own beliefs in the way that I felt the religion that I grew up with had been doing.
Inclusiveness, as Robinson sees it, has its limits, and Rick Warren is outside those limits. Robinson assigns Warren his place at the table – a low place at a very small table by the kitchen.
The “undefensive” church in which Robinson found a home while disputing its creed has been transformed. Now that the questioning Robinson has been welcomed in and given authority, the debate must end.
As with all great liberal causes, once the left gains the upper hand, the debate is declared over.
Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make, and Robinson deserves something more substantive. Heresy comes to mind, but I suspect Robinson shrugs off that label daily, sure in the belief that his own lights have guided him to a higher understanding.
But there’s more: Robinson articulates the breathtaking hubris that the nation must not invoke a God other than the one Robinson knows. Which makes Robinson precisely what the left accused Jerry Falwell of being. The comparison is not fair to Falwell, who was far more tolerant than Robinson. Robinson is more like the left’s caricature of Falwell.
Come to think of it, Robinson is rather like a caricature of all he professes: a caricature of tolerance, a caricature of a bishop, and a man consumed by own hedonism.
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