President Obama must have learned some very strange preaching strategies at the liberation theology church he attended in Chicago, led by his mentor Rev. Jeremiah “God d*** America” Wright. You’ll remember that Obama took the occasion of the Islamic State burning a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage to lecture the National Prayer Breakfast in February on the evils of the Crusades.

This past weekend, he used the Easter Sunday Prayer Breakfast to deliver a Good Friday sermon on suffering and sin. The sin was not the recent slaughter of Christians in Kenya by Muslim militants. The suffering was not the loss of liberty Christians face under gay totalitarianism.

No, the President marked the Resurrection by warning of the grave danger that “less-than-loving expressions by Christians” pose to civil peace in America. Here he was not speaking of the death and arson threats aimed at an Indiana pizzeria owner by intolerant gay activists. Nor of the epithet “Nazi” which Obama’s employee Dept. of Labor economist Elizabeth Ashack applied to Indiana voters. Nor the termination notice received by Catholic high school teacher Patricia Jannuzzi from her local bishop for opposing same-sex marriage on Facebook.

No, Obama apparently was speaking of Christians who cling to traditional Christian sexual ethics. The president was so “concerned” about “expressions” of this “less-than-loving” creed, that he could barely contain himself. According to Mediate, “As the crowd began to murmur, the president backed off, saying, ‘But that’s a topic for another day…. I was about to veer off,’ he explained. ‘I’m pulling it back.’”

Given the silky tact which the president always uses when speaking about Islam — a religion on the march, whose “bloody borders” are littered with the Muslim and non-Muslim victims of jihad — and the thinly veiled rage he feels toward traditional Christians, it seems that Obama has taken an old leftist slogan and gotten it backwards. He aims to comfort the comfortable, and afflict the already afflicted.

Obama’s implied description of Christian love is a poor and watery one, better suited to greeting cards and the Hallmark Channel than to a world-changing religion. And he doesn’t even believe it. Thinking as he does that self-righteousness is wrong, Obama nevertheless feels free to lecture Christians for being less than righteous. Why shouldn’t Christians who believe that sodomy is wrong do their neighbors the same kind of favor?

Is it only sexual sins that we must pass over in silence — and if so, why? Because they are purely private and have no effect on the way we live? The last time I checked my biology books, the whole of human society is generated in the first place, and held together in families, by sexual acts and sexual bonds. No sex, no people — and hence no taxpayers and no presidents.

Like waltzing or hockey, sex is inherently social, and the way we go about having sex determines who we are, how and whether we flourish, and how well or badly our kids turn out.

Obama agrees with every preacher ever born that it is an act of love to gently admonish the sinner. He simply disagrees about what constitutes a sin. But that dispute, over the details of Christian sexual morality, has nothing to do with the question of which Christians are more (or less-than) loving. Instead, it centers on which kinds of sex acts are pleasing to God — a subject on which, as President of a country with no established church, he has zero standing to speak.

There may be Christians out there who haven’t yet learned to speak to sexual sinners with due compassion, who carry on the old and easy contempt for people whose sins they consider strange and repugnant.

C.S. Lewis was gentle and reticent when discussing other boys’ homosexual relationships in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, not wishing to harshly condemn people whose temptations he couldn’t fathom. Some do just the opposite, but such self-righteous Christians are weak, isolated and mostly over 50. They don’t run computer companies or retail chains. In fact, they’d better keep quiet on social media if they want to keep jobs at all. They are hardly a threat to national amity, and the president surely realizes that.

Sex trafficking, sex addiction, divorce and abortion are far graver threats to human dignity today than tut-tutting, self-righteous Christians. By lumping Christ’s disciples in with the Pharisees, the president knew what he did: a political victory dance over the Body of Christ, the Church — on the very morning we gather to pray at His empty tomb.