LAKE FOREST, Calif. (ABP) — Barack Obama and John McCain will make their first joint 2008 campaign appearance to an audience of Christian activists at a Southern Baptist church.
The two have agreed to participate in a "compassion forum" at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. on August 16. Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, extended the invitation.
"I just got to thinking, you know what? These guys have never been together on the same stage, it would be a neat way to cap the primary season before they both go to the conventions and things go dark for a couple of weeks," he told the New York Times. "I've known both the guys for a long time, they're both friends of mine, and I knew them before they ran for office, so I just called them up."
Warren will moderate the forum, which will focus on moral-values issues — such as poverty, the environment and global AIDS relief — in which many centrist and younger evangelicals have taken an increasing interest.
It will be in a non-debate format and Warren will interview the candidates separately for about an hour each. Warren will pose the questions. There will be no panel or questions from members of the audience. Obama will go first, as determined by a coin toss.
"The primaries proved that Americans care deeply about the faith, values, character and leadership convictions of candidates as much as they do about the issues," Warren said in a press release. "While I know both men as friends and they recognize I will be frank, but fair, they also know I will be raising questions in these four areas beyond what political reporters typically ask."
The four areas include: poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate and human rights.
This forum will be the presumptive nominees' only joint campaign event prior to each party's national convention, according to the press release.
The event is part of a series Saddleback calls the "Saddleback Civil Forum on Leadership and Compassion." According to a press release, the series "was established to promote civil discourse and the common good of all." A past event, held during Passover, featured Holocaust survivors sharing their stories. Another forum, set for September, features former British prime minister Tony Blair, who recently converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism.
The church has invited the moderate-to-progressive group Faith in Public Life to co-sponsor the event. In April, the group hosted a similar Compassion Forum for presidential candidates at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.
Some Religious Right groups have reacted skeptically to the announcement. Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council said he hopes Warren will also ask the candidates about issues — such as abortion and gay rights — that have been of paramount importance to conservative Christian voters in the past.
In a July 21 e-mail update sent to FRC supporters, Perkins said, "While the Left would have us believe that this is the faith community's new agenda, a candid discussion of traditional values issues such as life, marriage, and religious freedom is what American voters need and deserve. Surely Rev. Warren won't ignore the most crucial initiative in his state (and perhaps the entire nation) as California determines the fate of marriage this November."
Perkins was referring to California, which earlier this year became the second state in the union to legalize same-sex marriage. Gay-rights opponents have gotten a proposed constitutional amendment on the state's general-election ballot that would illegalize gay marriage again.
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— Robert Marus contributed to this story