Trying to get back into the saddle at the associational office after being gone for some 10 days is tough. Fortunately, not a lot on the calendar this week.

First Baptist Church of Kenner is agog over the upcoming visit from the prospective pastor this weekend. He will meet with various groups on Saturday, including the senior adults at lunch, various individuals in the afternoon, and the entire church for a dinner that night, followed by Q and A. He’ll preach Sunday and then the congregation will express their sense of the Lord’s leadership (also known as “voting on him,” a poor choice of terms).

Church administrator Danny Moore said Tuesday, “The congregation is so excited about his coming, I think they’re ready to ‘vote him in’ right now before they’ve even met him.” In my conversation with the pastor today, I told him what Danny said, and for a moment considered teasing him with, “You’ll have to do a lousy job to blow it this Sunday, because everyone is so ready for you!” But, he doesn’t need any more pressure. I’ve been in his position a few times and the hardest thing you have to do is keep the focus off what the congregation wants and keep it on pleasing the Lord.

I dug out Cal Thomas’ op-ed column from Monday’s Times-Picayune since its message has followed me around the last two days. He was commenting on Barack Obama’s religious faith, wondering if he is indeed a Christian as he claims. Thomas’ authority, he’s quick to point out, is an interview Obama gave to the Chicago Sun-Times’ religion editor Cathleen Falsani in 2004. She was writing a book, “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People,” for which she interviewed Obama.

“I’m rooted in the Christian tradition,” she quotes Obama. Then, he says one of those innocuous things that only an outsider to the Christian faith would utter: “I believe there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.”

That is tantamount to a medical doctor stating his belief that all remedies for physical ailments–everything from modern medical science to the incantations of medicine men to the ignorant drillings and potions of witch doctors–are equal in value and similarly effective. I don’t think so.

Falsani went on to say that Obama believes “all people of faith–Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone–know the same God.”

The only person who can utter such a statement is someone unfamiliar with any of those “gods.” The more you find out about them, the quicker you see how incompatible they are.

Cal Thomas, a devout Catholic if I remember correctly, concludes, “Evangelicals and serious Catholics might ask if this is so, why did Jesus waste His time coming to Earth, suffering pain, rejection and crucifixion? If there are many ways to God, He might have sent down a spiritual version of table manners and avoided the rest.”

Amen, Cal. You hit the nail squarely on the head. One cannot hold to the uniqueness of Jesus and the validity of all those religions at the same time. They will not co-exist. Having read the Old Testament through a number of times, I must have seen a hundred times where God–the Jehovah Yahweh God of the Jews–says something like, “I am the Lord God and beside me there is none else.” He’s the only God there is, and He had nothing but contempt for all those other wannabe-deities.

I’ll skip the rest of Thomas’ narrative on Obama’s faith, as gleaned from Falsani’s book. But toward the end, he writes, “Obama either hasn’t read the Bible, or if he has, doesn’t believe it if he embraces such thin theological wisps.”

The last paragraph reads: “Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement. One cannot deny central tenets of the Christian faith, including the deity and uniqueness of Christ as the sole mediator between God and Man and be a Christian. Such people do have a label applied to them in Scripture. They are called ‘false prophets.'”

Now, having reported this, let me add two thoughts of my own.

1) I’m an equally opportunity skeptic about the religious faith of politicians. Unwilling to say anything to offend, they usually water down their convictions to the point that they end up offending all serious believers. Personally, I’d rather they’d say nothing and let us observe their character and arrive at our own conclusions.

I am aware that there are glittering exceptions to this, and invite readers to leave their own comments and testimonials at the conclusion of this.

2)Let us bear in mind that Cal Thomas was quoting from a four-year-old interview with Barack Obama, and a lot can happen to a fellow in that time, particularly if he is actually growing in his faith. In four years, he could have read the Bible through at least twice, and he may feel vastly different as a result. Still, it’s one more element in the consideration of Obama’s faith and character.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has gone public in his Catholicism–and presumably his commitment to the Christian faith, not just that particular strain–and is taking heat for waiting so long to do so. He said he waited until he left public office to come “out of the closet,” so to speak, because he did not want to look as if this were a sham or publicity stunt. Now, he is being attacked for putting his political career above God.

You can’t win for losing.

I’ve heard that John McCain has committed his life to Christ and worships with his family at one of our Southern Baptist churches in Phoenix. I have no personal knowledge of this, but wish it were true of every candidate for every office. McCain is postponing his public confession and baptism until later, we are told, for the same reasons Prime Minister Tony Blair had expressed.

I have news for him. Everything you do and everything you say that concerns your religious faith will be dissected and analyzed, questioned and doubted, held up to ridicule and criticized as fake. (I’m well aware that Cal Thomas–and

indirectly , I–did just that with Barack Obama.)

So, you might as well do what you ought to do and take your lumps.

I drove Adrian Rogers to the airport and we discussed this very matter. This was nearly 30 years ago, and the politicians were of that generation, but the principle still holds. He said, “I’m about to get on this plane and fly to Memphis. Now, given a choice between an unbeliever who knows how to fly the plane and a devout Christian who doesn’t have a clue, I’ll take the unbelieving pilot every time.” Same with politicians, he said. Some unbelieving politicians are more reliable and dependable in Congress than some who call themselves Christians but do not live their faith.

“Look for the character of the man.”

Question for our readers: are you registered to vote in the election this November? If not, there’s still time. Call your courthouse and ask about the procedure.

Tuesday morning, I ran by the church prior to Vacation Bible School and, among other things, saw my grandchildren. Eleven-year-old Erin showed me the Nancy Drew book she’s reading. It was number 34 in the series. I said, “You are aware that Carolyn Keene did not write all those stories? That different people wrote them under that name?” She was.

I said, “What do we call it when people write under another name?” She said tentatively, “Anonymous?” I said, “We call it a pseudonym. It means a made up name.”

I remembered then that she had spoken of becoming a writer and said, “For instance, when you write books, you could choose a pseudonym like…Elizabeth Gatwood. It’s your middle name and your mom’s maiden name.” She liked that.

I said, “You are going to be a writer, aren’t you?”

She said with a big grin, “It’s one of my options.”

I’m still smiling at that. We all need lots of options.

Every politician has options. Nothing is more crucial than whom he installs at the center of his inner power center, which is to say, the God he chooses to worship. What you hope is that it’s not something of his own creation or the figment of someone else’s imagination.

There is the living God and then there are all those other sad imitations out there.