Former President Barack Obama is accusing some liberals of embracing what he refers to as a “holier-than-thou superiority” that he likened to the conservative Christian Moral Majority movement, which he described as “dangerous.”
Obama appeared on the “WTF” podcast with comedian Marc Maron on Monday. The two discussed political polarization in the United States and the importance of engaging in discussions with people with opposing views.
“There’s been a lot of post-mortem about Democrats and progressives,” Obama said, telling Maron that he saw his stand-up routine where he suggested that Democrats “figured out how to be so annoying.” Maron recalled how he had previously suggested that Democrats “annoyed the average American into fascism.”
Obama insisted that he has repeatedly told Democrats and progressives, “You can’t just be a scold all the time.”
“You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging that you’ve got some blind spots too and that life’s messy,” he said.
“The vulnerability, I think, comes in saying … ‘I’ve got some core convictions, I’ve got beliefs that I’m not going to compromise but I’m also not going to assert that I am so righteous and so pure … and so insightful that there’s not the possibility that maybe I’m wrong on this.'”
Obama, 64, lamented what he described as “some progressive language” that came across as “a holier-than-thou superiority that’s not that different from what we used to joke about coming from … the right and the Moral Majority.”
The Moral Majority political movement materialized in the late 1970s and sought to fight progressivism by working to register Evangelical Christians to vote and advocate for conservative positions on abortion and sexuality. The Moral Majority is credited with bringing socially conservative voters who previously supported Democrats into the Republican Party and making “values voters” an important part of the Republican coalition.
The 44th president characterized the Moral Majority as “a certain fundamentalism about how to think about stuff that I think was dangerous.”
David Closson, the director of the Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, reacted to Obama’s comments in an interview with The Christian Post. He characterized the Moral Majority as a movement “animated by deep convictions related to the American family.”
“The Family Research Council was born out of some of those efforts” in 1983 in response to concerns that “the American family did not have a voice in Washington, D.C., Closson said.
“I think no one’s going to be surprised that Barack Obama is lobbing insults towards the Moral Majority when his two terms as president were largely fueled by convictions that tried to undo many of the policies that the Moral Majority fought for, whether that’s issues related to family, religious freedom, protecting the unborn,” Closson added. “And so I don’t think anyone should be looking to Barack Obama for an accurate history of the Moral Majority and the convictions that animated their work.”
For his part, Obama insisted that he didn’t adopt a “holier-than-thou superiority” when talking to his political opponents.
“If I talked about trans issues, I wasn’t talking … down to people and saying, ‘Oh, you’re a bigot,'” he said. “I’d say, ‘You know what? It’s tough enough being a teenager. Let’s treat all kids differently. Why would we want to see kids bullied?'”
Obama also expressed his disapproval of people who look down on others who don’t “see things exactly the way I do.”
While the podcast focused heavily on the importance of civil discourse, the conversation was not without criticism of Obama’s political opponents.
“What you’re seeing right now is a reassertion of this idea of like, ‘Nope, if you don’t look a certain way, you don’t think a certain way, you don’t practice a certain faith … you’re not a real American,” Obama maintained.
When Maron used the terms “authoritarianism” and “fascism” when discussing the current political climate in the U.S., Obama agreed that “There is no doubt that a lot of the norms, civic habits, expectations … institutional guardrails that we had, that we took for granted for our democracy have been weakened deliberately.”
The discussion about political discourse in the U.S. comes just over a month after the politically motivated assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which has led to a renewed national conversation about the importance of civility. While Obama and Maron did not touch upon the Kirk assassination, they did briefly talk about the suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for erroneously suggesting that the conservative influencer’s killer was a supporter of President Donald Trump.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
