When One of Your Heroes is On Colbert
Tony Campolo, one of my heroes for years, was on The Colbert Report last night. I watched with a certain amount of trepidation. While I enjoy the show, what would happen when someone I have a great deal of respect for comes on the show? What would happen?

Perhaps the opening comment where Colbert said he was going to ask Campolo, a "liberal evangelical" what it's like to be a "living oxymoron."

Actually, I was quite intrigued to see how Stephen did with Tony. You see, somewhere over 20 years ago this old pmPilgrim produced a public access TV series on faith in York, PA. That year Tony was coming to town to do a series of public "revival" services at the local fairgrounds so I had him on our program for an interview. The easiest one I ever did. Ask a question and Tony would talk for ten or more minutes.

So, how did Stephen do? After a joyous Hava Nagila introduction, it was off to the races for Tony. He joked and laughed and smiled and got in a lot of good lines.

Tony: Jesus loves America, Iraq, Afghanistan- always loved even before it was Afghanistan. Jesus is International... even better than the UN.
Stephen: Speechless.

Then he got serious.

Tony: (not a direct quote): We don't like to be called the "evangelical left." We are red-letter Christians. All verses Jesus says are in red-letters in the Bible. We are following His words.

(In reponse to a comment about Jesus being Republican:)
Jesus transcends partisan politics. Jesus doesn't care who's president? He'd be very confused going into the voting booth. There's good and bad in both parties. That's what's wrong with the religious right- they want to make him a republican and he's not.

Then came the gem- no, THE GEM in response to a question about mixing politics and religion:

Politics has changed religion- it's like mixing ice cream with horse manure. It doesn't do anything to the manure but it ruins the ice cream. This has caused great harm to religion- we will live to regret the error.

Well, Colbert managed better than I did. Or maybe Tony has slowed down? Nah!
--Link to the video on Comedy Central and go to "videos."