“Barack Obama’s Profession of Faith”

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

     Illinois Senator Barack Obama is on everyone’s short list of future Democratic presidential aspirants. Eloquent, photogenic and accomplished, with a compelling East-meets-Midwest-meets-Africa personal story, Obama hasn’t lost any time grappling with the big and difficult themes of American politics. Two weeks ago, he made a major speech calling upon Democrats to reexamine their party’s approach to religion and politics. “Progressives,” he argued, “make a mistake when [they] fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives,” when they fail to come to grips with the fact that “Americans are a religious people.”

     Beginning with an account of his own coming to faith as an adult, Obama’s remarks constitute a powerful statement of a “progressive” vision of the relationship between religion and politics. Alternately perspicacious and confused, his statement is important for what it reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to religion and politics.

     Obama acknowledges that our religious impulses and inclinations follow from “a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.” We want, he says, “a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to [our] lives.” Standing by itself, this is a complicated and perhaps studiedly ambiguous statement. Does it mean that we have an all-too-human need for significance in the face of our impending nothingness, that, in covering up our loneliness, religion merely satisfies a need? Or does it mean that we’re creatures who have an intimation of our creatureliness and our relationship with our Creator?

     Obama’s language often suggests the former and only occasionally the latter. He came to faith, he says, after he realized, as a young adult, that “something was missing” in his own life: “without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.” He “found [himself] drawn,” however, to the African-American church because, “in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, [he] was able to see faith as more than just a comfort for the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.” Note the deprecation of the traditional role of faith and his characterization of it as a kind of “hedge,” or should I say crutch? Religion in this view serves the needs of finite beings, but to be compelling, it has to offer more than that. “As an active, palpable agent in the world,” it has to offer hope for improvement in this life. In Obama’s view, then, the “active, palpable agent” and the “source of hope” is the church—that is, a human organization—not God. Stated in this way, it’s hard to tell the difference between a church and a government, a political party, or a country.

     Indeed, when he keynoted the 2004 Democratic Convention, he invited his listeners to adopt the politics of hope and to believe in the promise of the United States of America. If you’re nice, you call this a civil religion.  If you want to be critical, you might call it something approaching idolatry.

     What’s more, this understanding of the role of religion by itself offers no obvious principled basis for distinguishing between the concerns of church and state. Religion and politics are intimately related because churches seem to exist mainly as communities struggling for justice in this world.

     Were there nothing more to Obama’s understanding of religion, we could dismiss it as impoverished and merely political, perhaps even Machiavellian.

     But there is this:

You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away—because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.

     Here we have a confession of weakness and finitude that can’t be remedied by any organization or government program. We’re sinners in need of God’s grace, not just more federal spending or, for that matter, bracing speeches about lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps.

     This understanding leads Obama to sing the following refrain, which could almost be found in George W. Bush’s hymnbook:

[T]he problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness—in the imperfections of men.

Solving these problems will require changes in governmental policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby—but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in the young man’s heart—a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

At first, it sounds like the villains of Obama’s piece are going to be the usual Democratic suspects—the callous corporate types who profit from other people’s misery. As usual, it seems, everyone else is a victim. But then he surprises us. The sinners aren’t only in the boardrooms. They’re on the streets too.

     To be sure, he doesn’t simply preach personal responsibility, as if each of us could help himself or herself. But our weakness doesn’t come wholly or solely from our victimization, which can be redressed by social justice in the form of governmental programs. It also comes from our sinful natures, which in this world can be addressed, as George W. Bush would say (and I can’t see Obama disagreeing), by the loving embrace of a faith community. “My Bible tells me,” he says, “that if we can train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it.” We can cultivate a sense of responsibility in young people, a sense that will—if we do it right—stay with them throughout their lives.

     It is thus not surprising that he acknowledges the potential effectiveness of “certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.” Since it’s offered in the context of revisiting the so-called wall of separation between church and state, such language ought to warm the cockles of Chuck Colson’s heart, while giving Barry Lynn nightmares.

     Although he notes both the religious and secular versions of separationism, he doesn’t simply follow either. While he cites those who would defend the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world, he seems to approve principally of what he regards as their activism in the world. Avoiding the corruption of the world takes a back seat to being as free as possible to reform it. Eternal life seems to be secondary to a better life in the here and now. We can’t forget, he says, that “the majority of the great reformers in American history…were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.” Indeed, “if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.”

     In the light of this recognition, it’s more than a little odd that he makes the following argument:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible by people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends upon our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

     Let me begin my commentary on this rich and interesting passage by taxing Obama with imprecision. Democracy, as the rule of the majority, doesn’t by itself require any self-restraint or self-limitation. Speaking purely democratically, if a majority wishes to adopt Islamic law or—in the view of another prominent Democratic Senator from Illinois, Stephen F. Douglas—slavery, that is its prerogative. As Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln reminds us, liberal democracy, which demands respect for the rights of individuals, is something else altogether.

     For Obama, however, rationalism in politics seems to be strategic necessity following from our pluralism. Because, apparently, we can’t agree on our deepest principles, we should all be reasonable, seeking the sensible, rather than the sublime.  But if “millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice” in religious terms, why is an appeal to reason the practical way to proceed? And if the impetus to political and moral reform comes—often, if not always—from religion, why restrict ourselves to bland and dispassionate rational appeals? Finally, if, as he says earlier in the speech, “our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition,” why not refresh our politics by returning to that well-spring?

     Obama says he’s worried about the kind of extremism that genuine religion may demand. Citing the example of Abraham and Isaac, he says that, of course, we’d all bring public authority to bear to protect the child, regardless of what Abraham says he heard:

We would all do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Fair enough, but it’s not clear to me that we’re dealing with such extraordinary circumstances in our contemporary political life. Aside from the irony of the fact that the one “religious” issue he cites—abortion—is one in which people allegedly motivated solely by religion are protecting lives rather than sacrificing them, even most biblical inerrantists are capable of either using reason themselves or of finding ground with like-minded rationalists. The Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding, the case against abortion rests on a deep and rich rational foundation. By contrast, the argument on its behalf recurs to protecting something ultimately irrational: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” as Justice Kennedy once put it.

     Obama’s use of the example of Abraham is troubling in another respect. Consider something that many parents feel called by God to do—home-school their children. In the eyes of some, home-schoolers—a significant number of them biblical inerrantists—are harming their children by depriving them of all the rights and opportunities, not to mention the “common reality,” that citizens ought to have. Presumably the case for restricting, regulating, or even prohibiting home-schooling can be offered in “rational,” or at least non-religious, terms. I don’t see, on the basis of the arguments he offers in this speech, how Obama could object. Oh, he could say something about pluralism or about the effectiveness of some faith-based programs, but the bottom line for him is this: in our public life, reason can trump faith, but faith can’t trump reason.

     This, then, is the basis of Obama’s understanding of the relationship between religion and politics. For Christians, some scriptural edicts are “central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life,” which is marked by pluralism and rationalism. When the church is at odds with the world, or at least with its secular liberal incarnation, it should give in, or at least be quiet, when any significant number of self-professed rationalists object. If you want to counsel your parishioners against abortion, feel free, but don’t legislate your morality (despite the fact that most legislation is based on someone’s morality). If you object to gay marriage, fine, don’t perform any ceremonies in you sanctuary, but leave the state to be influenced by the secular progressives, who will happily accept your support when your views happen to coincide with theirs.

     Of course, Obama has a tough audience. Addressing “progressives”—mostly secular, but some religious—he feels compelled to make the best and most persuasive (to them) case for admitting religious witness into public life. If he harbored religious beliefs at odds with those of his primary audience—as he apparently does with respect to same-sex marriage—and if he felt called to act publicly upon them, he might be dismissed as just another “Christianist.” So perhaps he soft-pedals the ways in which prophetic witness might make his particular audience uncomfortable.

     I don’t know what’s really in Obama’s heart, or on his mind. I do know that this is as far as he thinks he can go in promoting the religious voice in his party. In other words, I take his speech as offering a vision of the furthest Democrats can go in accommodating religious witness. When, as in the case of poverty policy, it can be deployed moralistically to impugn the motives of those who disagree with expansive government programs, he and his fellow progressives will welcome it. When, as in the case of abortion and same-sex marriage, it yields arguments that contradict the reigning liberal orthodoxy, it can perhaps be respected, but only as a private choice and a private voice in the confines of a sanctuary. He calls for extending to all a “presumption of good faith” but that’s not, it seems to me, the same as actually admitting them to a place at the table.

     In Obama’s world, Bob Casey is still on the outside looking in.