The all-liberal panel for Sunday's Meet the Press spent an entire segment gushing over President Obama's controversial statements about Christianity at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Most vocal, unsurprisingly, was David Brooks from The New York Times. He felt Obama recalling the crimes from Christianity's past a timely subject and completely appropriate for a prayer breakfast.  

Brooks said:

I'm pro-Obama. I'm totally pro-Obama on this. I think he said the right thing. Listen, it was a gospel of humility. What sorts of people need a little gospel of humility? People in Washington, pundits, religious believers -- I happen to be all three of those things. And so we're told to walk humbly in the path of The Lord. The Lord's ways are mysterious, and so you're saying, you know, we're prone to zealotry...we're fallen. And so to underline that, that's useful in Washington today, that's useful always. 

Also on hand defending Obama was BBC anchor Katty Kay, who said the president's opponents are way too eager to jump on everything he says. She described the political divide in America as along the lines of the three G's: God, guns, and government, something she said isn't experienced in England. "We are much more secular, we are much more prone to liking government, and we cannot understand the gun culture in this country," she said. Kay agreed that Obama's comments at the prayer breakfast couldn't have come at a better time.

An editor of the Detroit Press, Stephen Henderson, weighed in from a racial perspective and said the real reason Christian Americans are bothered by Obama's remarks are because it invoked an uncomfortable memory of the immoral acts committed against blacks.

"I think one of the things that's bothering people here is the invocation of race, which this president doesn't do all that often, talk about our racial history," Henderson said.

He continued:

I think that's what set people off. And I also think that it's important for him to be doing that. Think of all the context right now in which we're having a moral-framed discussion about our races -- on the big screen in movies, like "Selma." I think the president was trying to reference that at the breakfast. 

Todd suggested that perhaps a president shouldn't start this discussion and could save it for after he leaves office. Brooks disagreed:

No, I think he was right. He gave the race speech, it was a beautiful speech. He's given a whole series of great speeches -- Trayvon Martin, he's given us. I think this was really fine. This is exactly the moment you want to say this. We're at most moral danger to ourselves when we're caught up in a righteous fervor against an evil foe, which is what have. And so, while we exercise hard power, we have to take morally hazardous action, where we're prone to get caught up in our own self-righteousness. This is exactly the moment you want to raise this.

The lone voice of dissension came from an unlikely source, NBC's Andrea Mitchell. She broke rank among her liberal colleagues and said Obama "can't really go back to 1095" to make a point. She added that it was a mistake for the president to say things "so out of context." 

Mitchell said a more appropriate subject for a prayer breakfast would be faith:

If you're giving a major speech about theology, perhaps, but this is the prayer breakfast.

You don't use the word 'Crusades,' number one, in any context right now. It's too fraught. And the week after a pilot is burned alive in a video shown, you don't lean over backwards to be philosophical about the sins of the fathers. You have to deal with the issue that's in front of you, or don't deal with it at all. Talk about faith.