A Little Talk with the Man Who Prayed for Obama's Death

Even by the nut case standard of the assorted pack of neo-Nazi unreconstructed Klan members, Aryan Nation haters, and the legion of loose screw religious cranks and loonies, the Reverend Wiley S. Drake's public prayer for the death of President Obama stretched far past the outer limit of credulity. The unrepentant Drake did not back away from the prayer when asked about it by Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio on June 2. He pleaded that he didn't understand why people were upset with his comments.

Drake is not just a garden variety religious crank. In 2006, he reigned as the second vice president of the nearly 20 million strong Southern Baptist Convention. The group is by far the nation's biggest evangelical denomination. He pastors a bonafide church, the First Southern Baptist Church in the middle-class bedroom city of Buena Park, California. Drake has his own popular radio show on the Crusade Radio Network. In April, Southern Baptist Convention spokesperson Richard Land even had kind words for Obama for his family values emphasis.

Convention officials, though, were far less forthright about Wiley's death prayer death for Obama. It issued a perfunctory statement saying that his views were his and his alone. It did not vigorously denounce those views, especially his Obama death prayer.

Wiley skirted the legal definition of what constitutes a threat to the president by attributing the death prayer to a phony, made up prayer from God. The operative term is willful in the federal statute that makes it an offense to threaten the president. It's punishable by up to five years in prison. Every year, the Secret Service investigates about 1500 reported or discovered threats to the president. Drake's God attribute threat didn't escape their attention.

But Drake doesn't just speak for Drake, and a handful of cranks, but says what more than a few ultra conservative, religious fundamentalists actually think and belief, and in their scariest and darkest moments the violence they actually wish for. With the murder of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, the Holocaust Museum shoot-up, the recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center on a surge in hate groups, and the demand by a worried US Attorney General Eric Holder for a tougher hate law, death threats against public figures can't be shrugged off.

This writer, however, couldn't let Drake's purported death prayer on Obama lightly pass. So I had a little talk with him mostly to give him another chance to back off his prayer.
Here's an excerpt from the June 19 talk with Drake:

"Did you actually pray for President Obama's death?"

"No, I was merely citing an imprecatory prayer which in scripture is a prayer mandated by God to smite down the enemies....those that do evil."

"So you're saying that you did not actually call for Obama's death?"

"I was asked in an interview about the murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller and I said in an imprecatory prayer that Tiller who was responsible for the murder of thousands of children was given a chance at salvation and that didn't happen so he was condemned in prayer to die. I had no regrets about his death. I was then asked if the imprecatory prayer for the death of evil doers could even extend to the president. I said yes. I was merely citing a prayer."

"Do you stand by that?"

"Unfortunately in the interview I said Obama. I'm not wanting (sic) the president dead. The prayer for his death is not my prayer but comes from God."

Drake said since the story hit he's gotten personal death threats and threats to picket and even burn down his church. The unrepentant Drake laughed them off saying he had nothing to fear since he was doing God's work.

A final question:

"Pastor will you come on my weekly radio show and explain to listeners the reason for citing a prayer against the president?"

"I'd better talk to my attorney first."

Stay tuned on that one.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard weekly in Los Angeles Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

Comments

[chazzman]

I wish these so called christian evanglicals WOULD read the new testament and not the old testament so much, Vengence is mine says the lord. Unless the right rev is God he has no right or authority to exact vengence on a fellow man. GBA and BHO.

[kwinter]

Isn't the god of the new testament the same god of the old testament?
Or did the god change?
Most believers say that their god is perfect.
If something is perfect, and then changes, it becomes imperfect.
If something is now perfect, but it has changed, then it must have been imperfect before.
If you believe the god of the bible has changed, then either that god is imperfect now, or was imperfect when you believe he created the universe.
Or is your bible so seriously flawed, that it cannot be relied on to have any credibility? And if that's the case, what do base your belief on?

[fdrrules]

The bible is seriously flawed and the gods of the new testament and the old are completely different characters.The God of the old testament called for murder,rape,torture and the god of the new for love of all your fellow man.you fundamentalist should try reading the new testament occassionally,it might make you better Christians.

[minimalist syntax]

kwinter is right. In fact, to reject the God of the OT as not being the God of the NT was condemned as heresy as early as the 2nd C. (Marcionism). But kwinter's reading of the OT (and consequently the NT) is wrong in my opinion. The scriptures unfold as the story of God, as God pursues the humans that reject their union with Him from the garden of Eden, through all the kingdoms of Israel, flirting with their God, sometimes deeply loving him, but usually rejecting him. This story seeks to establish that the deity Yahweh is the true universal God. There are terribly destructive battles against this true God and false gods as in the battle to free the Jews from the Egyptians. This story of God which begins in the laws ends with the goal, the purpose, being Jesus Christ. In the NT Jesus is revealed as the ultimate reality of the story of God. In the psalms, which is presumably what Drake is citing as his "authority", God is presented as a king. The psalms establish His kingship and as a king, God has enemies. The kind of prayers Drake is trying to misuse for his own insane purposes are ones where the king is wished to vanquish his enemies or where He successfully smites his enemies. These are the spiritual enemies of the spiritual king. They are not the enemies of the neocons.

[minimalist syntax]

For Christians who are not fundamentalists, at least for Orthodox Christians, we are not faced with the person Christ, but rather with the *texts* of the OT and NT, both of which point to Christ as one scripture. These texts have NEVER been read literally within the historical church. Only the uniquely American, and uniquely capitalistic phenomenon of the Evangelical-Fundamentalists have read the Bible in this way-- and in so doing made the Bible a god. And we can see the horrible destructive results of their twisting of the story of God in the hands of Evangelical-Fundamentalists.

[dakotawoman]

Yep!

They are indulging in what I call "biblolatry."

Worshipping a book (and an undependable, conflicted, mistranslation of a bunch of clearly tampered with ancient hearsay that cannot be authenticated at that!) instead of a Supreme Being.

When you turn over the rock called American fundamentalism you find all kinds of nasty wormy thinking that is more about them getting their own way and rejecting/judging others than about the actual messages of Christ -- at least as I read and was taught.

[DavidDial]

This guy is a perfect example of the sorry state of what passes for Christianity in this country. This man is an affront to the teachings and memory of Jesus of Nazareth.

[mediamarv]

By coincidence, I am praying for the death of Rev. Drake.... I had a dream last night in which I was told to do so, so it must be valid, right?

BTW, is there some kind of lawsuit that can be brought against a wacko like Drake? I am requesting my senators to inform the Secret Service the importance of keeping a close watch, including emails (thanks Patriot act) on this guy.

[Maxiesid]

So, David Letterman - a late night comic - makes a joke about Palin, and we spend a week hearing the right wing go crazy over how he didn't have the right to say mean things about her. They wanted him fired, they wanted a new law that protects right wing radicals from comics and anyone else who might say mean things about them. He apologized twice...
BUT when it comes to a PASTOR in a church of GOD praying for the death of the President of the United States of America, and praying for the death of a private citizen... the right wing sees no problem with that? They have gone completely insane as a group and all need to be under constant observation.

[CyrusBeaucephus]

American right wingers who do not distance themselves from openly hateful rhetoric are all basically proto-terrorists. Suprise! I've been saying that since the 80's