Former White House Staffer Describes Encountering Unprecedented Bible Ignorance
"Another staffer repeatedly deleted..."
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During his tenure first as a White House staffer and later as the coordinator of President Barack Obama’s faith-outreach efforts in the 2012 election, Michael R. Wear encountered an unprecedented amount of ignorance and apathy toward the Christian religion.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic concerning his upcoming book, Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America, Wear highlighted one especially telling experience.
He had reportedly drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing the president’s views on poverty and titled it, Economic Fairness and the Least of These.
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By “Least of These,” he meant a line from the Christian Bible wherein Jesus commands his disciples to care for “the least of these,” i.e., the poor and marginalized.
Anyone with knowledge of the Bible would know that, but shockingly, Wear’s peers in the White House did not.
“Another staffer repeatedly deleted ‘the least of these,’ commenting, ‘Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?'” The Atlantic explained.
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But this was just the tip of the iceberg. As time passed, Wear began to notice that the administration was “unnecessarily antagonistic toward religious conservatives,” especially in regard to its fight over abortion funding and contraception requirements.
Moreover, this attitude had expanded throughout the entire party.
“The Democratic Party used to welcome people who didn’t support abortion into the party,” he said. “We are now so far from that, it’s insane.”
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He added that the Democrats made barely any effort to reach religious voters during the 2016 election.
“Reaching out to evangelicals doesn’t mean you have to become pro-life,” he maintained. “It just means you have to not be so in love with how pro-choice you are, and so opposed to how pro-life we are.”
This stubborn refusal to be more tolerant and open-minded, which some might call ironic, wound up costing the Democrats dearly, as 81 percent of Evangelicals and a majority of Catholics wound up rebuffing Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton in favor of Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“It’s sad that this is a throwaway response, but it’s the duty of statesmanship,” Wear concluded, referring to the Democrats’ refusal to extend an olive branch regarding contentious issues such as abortion. “It’s the duty of living in a pluralistic society to make a case to all folks.”
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