Barack Obama's response at the Sojourners forum was relatively wonkish and long-winded, not leaving much room for anyone to ask questions or to change the subject.

We did learn that he thinks that there is evil in the world, that faith gives us hope for a better future, and that faith leads us to regard ourselves as our brother's and sister's keepers.

Let me begin with what he says about faith and its application in international affairs:

So when I look at the situation in the Middle East -- and this is true in other conflicts around the world -- the question I ask myself -- and this is where I do think faith comes in -- is, is there a way for us to reconcile the claims of both sides of the conflict in a way that leads to resolution and a better life for all people?....
 
And that's where I think faith can inform what we do: Faith can say, forgive someone who has treated us unjustly. Faith can say that, regardless of what's happened in the past, there's a brighter future ahead. And that's the kind of faith that I think has to inform, not just our international policies, but also domestic policies, as well.

While he doesn't quite say it--and he certainly didn't offer anyone the opportunity to ask it--I wonder how we can "reconcile the claims of both sides" if there is evil in the picture.  Perhaps he has to argue that there is evil on both sides:

I do think there's evil in the world. I think that, when planes crash into buildings and kill innocents, there's evil there. I think violence and cruelty, wherever it's perpetrated, expresses evil in the world.

There are just wars, he continues, indeed wars in which we have participated, but he's careful not so to characterize the current conflict:

What was also interesting about Lincoln, though, during the course of the Civil War, was his recognition that simply because we've engaged in something just doesn't mean that there aren't times where we may act unjustly. Abu Ghraib obviously is something that all of us should be ashamed for, even if you were supportive of a war. I believe Guantanamo, the decision to detain people without charges, is unjust.

And so the danger of using good versus evil in the context of war is it may lead us to be not as critical as we should be about our own actions.

So how we're supposed to regard our current conflict isn't altogether clear.  Our attackers were evil; some of our responses have been unjust.  But how are we supposed to regard and deal with those who sent our attackers on their evil mission?  Is faith supposed to lead us to reconciliation, on the ground that there are legitimate grievances on both sides, hatreds that need to be set aside?

I don't want to dismiss this position out of hand, especially in the way in which it humbles us, but I do want to insist that it is a faith-based position, one that commits us to a course of action that grows almost entirely out of a religiously-inspired view of the world.  I wonder what John Edwards would say about that.

Of course, the most often noted aspect of Obama's participation in this forum was his long excursus on domestic policy, which began with the notion that we are our brother's and sister's keepers.  This view, with its roots clearly in faith, has consequences not only for how we as individuals and members of churches and of other institutions of civil society conduct ourselves, but also for what we ask of government:

[T]he starting point is that, "I've got a stake in other people, and I've got a set of responsibilities towards others, not just towards myself," and that those mutual responsibilities, those obligations, have to express themselves, not just through our churches, and our synagogues, and our mosques, and our temples, not only in our own families, but they have to express themselves through our government. That, I would argue, is part of what created this amazing country that we live in.

We tend to tout our individualism and our self-reliance -- and those are important things -- but we also arrived at this place because we rose and fell together. And I think it's that spirit that's been lost in our politics over the last several years.

Faith-based responsibilities inspire governmental action.  And if governmental action doesn't conform to Obama's particular policy prescriptions, it can't be genuinely faith-based, can it?

To be sure, he's not altogether critical of his Republican brothers and sisters:

A couple of things that we have to do is to fix our politics, and we have to get beyond what Dr. King called the "either/or mentality" and embrace "the both/and mentality." And our politics have exacerbated this notion of either/or.

So we say either people are entirely responsible for their own lot -- and this tends to be expressed within Republican circles, but not entirely -- pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, act responsibly, act morally, a great emphasis on private morality, or, conversely, that individuals are responsible, society is acting on them, and they are not free agents.

And my attitude -- and I think the attitude of every religious leader and scholar that I value and listen to -- is that we have these individual responsibilities and these societal responsibilities. And those things aren't mutually exclusive....

I have to say that I'm very proud of the fact that we've seen some of my Republican colleagues informed by the evangelical movement embrace this notion of providing second chances. And they're to be applauded. This is an area where I think we can get past the left and right divide.

As I've noted before, Obama actually has some interesting things to say about personal responsibility, and some of that clearly comes from the religious tradition he adopted as an adult.  But his political agenda precedes and informs his approach to religion, despite the fact that he says that his moral commitments "rose out of my faith."  He was a community organizer before he came to Christ, and he came to Christ in the way he did because the teaching of his church comported with his prior political commitments.

I don't mean to say thereby that his approach to religion is merely political and instrumental.  But I think he has a harder time even than John Edwards separating his religion and his politics.  That's perhaps as it should be, so long as he's aware that religion doesn't teach us everything about public policy, that it leaves room for prudential judgments about what works and what doesn't, and that it humbles us.  He acknowledges this last point in a reference to Lincoln, but it doesn't stop him from criticizing the good faith (albeit relatively gently) of his adversaries and from referring to the programs he's proposing as "wonderful."

For me the bottom line is this: when Obama speaks as a man of faith, and doesn't use the cadences of the law professor, he's the most interesting of the three Democratic candidates.  I think there are immense problems with his views, but they're the least distorted by the need to pay obeisance to the language of secularism.