Rick Warren's Double Life

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America's Pastor—just announced as Obama's choice to give his inaugural prayer—has a nice-guy image. But it is belied by what he says on Sundays.

Here is how evangelical superstar Pastor Rick Warren, who will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration, described his philosophy this August: “I have never been considered a part of the religious right, because I don't believe politics is the most effective way to change the world.”

The mainstream press has been almost universally eager to indulge his self-description. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, called Warren “an evangelical liberals can love.” Newsweek named Warren one of fifteen “people who make America great.” And even The Nation published an article puffing Warren as “America’s Pastor,” a figure who “disassociates himself from the religious right, noting that he shares its position on social issues but doesn't want to focus on them. He focuses on poverty, disease and aid to Africa.”

Even the public relations firms responsible for burnishing Warren’s image seem mystified by the press’s worshipful portrayal of their client.

At age 54, Warren cuts a drastically different figure than the hard-right dinosaurs that defined the evangelical movement’s image. The mega-best-selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” Warren prefers jeans and short-sleeved shirts, often with loud, Hawaiian patterns, to the cheap suits familiar to Southern Baptist firebrands. He has a pudgy face and a paunch that gives him a teddy bear-like quality. When Warren preaches, he does so in a measured, almost ponderous tone, without hectoring or hollering.

Warren’s acknowledgment of climate change, his reputation for open mindedness and his calm manner enabled him to draw both Obama and John McCain in August to his Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, where he sequentially questioned the candidates on their faith. Warren’s stature was never higher than on that day. He was ascendant as the 21st century version of Billy Graham, pastor to presidents, minister of the national soul, but moving away from the hard right.

But his tolerant image is belied by what he says on Sunday.

A week before Election Day, here is what “America’s Pastor” told the 22,000 members of his Saddleback Church in Orange County: “Here’s an interesting thing: there are about 2% of Americans [who] are homosexual, gay, lesbian people. We should not let two percent of the population determine—to change a definition of marriage that has been supported by every single culture and every single religion for 5,000 years. This is not even just a Christian issue, it is a humanitarian and human issue, that God created marriage for the purpose of family, love and procreation. I urge you to support Proposition 8 and to pass that on.”

Warren has also supported every major ballot measure opposing gay marriage that sprouted up in his native California in the past ten years, a fact that is barely mentioned in accounts of him as the pioneer of a “New Evangelical” movement that sees beyond the old hobgoblins of the far right. Warren waged a sub rosa campaign to re-elect George W. Bush, but was still described as never having been ”written or talked about…in the context of any political issue,” according to the non-partisan Religion News Service. Fighting the culture war with a velvet glove, Warren has constructed an international platform using two powerful constituencies few figures before him have been able to reconcile: conservative evangelicals hungry for more sophisticated leadership and opinion elites frantically searching for post-partisan heroes.

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