McCain's Religion Problem

Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest (mega-)Church in Columbus preaches before 5,200 Pentecostal parishioners and a large weekly television audience. A week before the hotly contested Ohio primary, he endorsed John McCain over Mike Huckabee, the favorite with most of his parishioners. Parsley called McCain the "true conservative" in the race.

According to a new article by David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, Parsley has called 9/11 a wake-up call to all Christians to wage "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

McCain appeared at a campaign rally in Cincinnati with Parsley a week before the primary. Corn doesn't report what was said at the rally, but here is an excerpt from Parsley's 2005 book, "Silent No More":

"I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.

Will McCain denounce Parsley and what he stands for? I use as my text this morning a column by Charles Krauthammer, headlined in the Washington Post: "The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud." Referring to Sen. Barack Obama's comparison of his grandmother's private fears about black men while walking the streets to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's angry denunciations of white America from the pulpit, Krauthammer asks, "Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?" He called Obama's speech and his failure to leave his church "an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction."

When will McCain, who asks us to endlessly stay the course in Iraq and threatens to "bomb, bomb, bomb, bombomba Iran," offer America a detailed explication of his views on Islam so that we can watch them on YouTube (I'll certainly reproduce it here). And, if he doesn't, or asks Americans to understand the anger about 9/11 that informs the wild ravings of a so-called man of God like Parsley, how long will it take before Krauthammer and his ilk call it a scandalous dereliction of duty?