Fred Clark at Slacktivist and Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism have reminded us of that curious and tasteless “Letter” Focus on the Family sent out during the 2008 elections warning us of the grave dangers we might face if Obama was elected president. The fictional letter from a Christian writing in October of 2012 describes how terrible everything is because of the ultra-liberal Obama. It lists 34 ways Obama has ruined America, everything from the abolishing of decency laws to the banning of guns. Clark concludes that Focus on the Family accurately predicted 0.5/34 of these events.

Clark highly praises Libby Anne’s post because it is “impressively thorough and methodical” in the way it goes through each of the 34 items. The problem is Libby Anne’s post is not thorough or methodical, except in its derision and mockery. By my count, she covers only 18 of the 34 points, and some of the ones she leaves out are contentious. For example, she skips over #12, which predicts that churches will no longer be able to meet in public schools. Of course, over the last year there have been a few court cases dealing with this very issue in New York where a number of churches were going to be evicted, so is it really fair to dismiss this fear as nonsense?

There are other problems with these criticisms of the letter. When Libby Anne dismisses the issues Focus on the Family raises, she fails to provide supporting citations, as if her claims were obviously correct and needed no support. And although Clark describes Focus on the Family’s letter as a “prediction” and a “prophecy,” they very clearly denied this in the opening of the letter:

This letter is not “predicting” that all of the imaginative future “events” named in this letter will happen. But it is saying that each one of these changes could happen and also that each change would be the natural outcome of (a) published legal opinions by liberal judges, (b) trends seen in states with liberal-dominated courts such as California and Massachusetts, (c) recent promises, practices and legislative initiatives of the current liberal leadership of the Democratic Party and (d) Senator Obama’s actions, voting record and public promises to the far-Left groups that won the nomination for him.

In addition, neither blogger mentions the fact that Focus on the Family isn’t making these issues up — each fear is based on some historical precedent which they carefully cite.

That said, Clark and Anne are right to draw our attention to this document and to encourage us to compare it to how events actually unfolded during Obama’s presidency. The list says a lot about how evangelicals engage in politics and what they fear. They are also right that, for the most part, this “letter” reveals Focus on the Family’s political rhetoric to be alarmist and harmful. And I think an actually thorough, methodical, and nuanced look at each of these 34 fears would help us during our current election season in the following ways:

It would give us a better perspective on Obama’s presidency. It would help us to think through what his next four years might be like. It would help us to be self-critical about the ways evangelicals use fear to political ends.

I suspect we’ll find that (1) Obama’s presidency turned out to be a lot more conservative in certain areas than we anticipated, (2) his reelection could reasonably result in the fulfillment of a number of these less-radical fears, and (3) evangelicals have shifted their priorities from the homosexual and pro-choice agendas to “Creeping Shariah” and Islam.

The Plan

What I would like to do is to compile a thorough and methodical analysis of this document by crowdsourcing. I know some of our readers are very knowledgeable about the Supreme Court, religious liberties, Obama’s records, taxes, and so on, and so I suspect that we could quickly and easily create a well-sourced and informative analysis of how Obama’s term compared to Focus on the Family’s “prediction.”

Bellow is the list of 34 fearful “predictions.” If you know how Obama did on a particular item and can back up your knowledge with a reliable source, please leave a comment with the item number and your analysis. As long as your response is reasonable and well supported, I’ll add it to the post. Ideally, we should end up with a very informative overview of Obama’s presidency.

The following is a condensed version of the list. Before you fact-check, please read the PDF and look up the full prediction for your item. Several of these points appear to be innocuous in their abbreviated form, but in the letter you can see that they are tied to much more outlandish claims. For example, #20, restricting home schooling doesn’t necessarily sound awful, but in the letter you see that the state mandates that the parents must be certified by the state, must use state-mandated textbooks, and they cannot teach that homosexuality is immoral.