Barack Obama
Emphasis added
April 2007
Barack Obama's search for faith: [Jodi Kantor, 4-30-07] "Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons....
"Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan....
"Trinity has 8,500 members today, making it the largest American congregation in the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination known for the independence of its congregations and its willingness to experiment with traditional Protestant theology....
"While he [Obama] has said he shares core Christian beliefs in God and in Jesus as his resurrected son, he sometimes mentions doubts. In his second book, he admitted uncertainty about the afterlife, and 'what existed before the Big Bang.'
"Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones.... He has said that he relies on Mr. Wright to ensure 'that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible.'...
"AIDS has spread in part because 'the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down, and needs to be repaired,' he said to thunderous applause in December at the megachurch in California led by the Rev. Rick Warren, a best-selling author."
March 2007
Barack Obama: [James Crabtree, March 2007] "He has already been on the front cover of Time and been endorsed by Oprah. His recent book, The Audacity of Hope, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list....
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Obama admits to taking both cannabis and cocaine: 'I had learned not to care… Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it...." Recently an interviewer asked about his marijuana use. He replied: 'I did inhale. That was the point.'..."In his mid-twenties, Obama left Chicago to enter the bastion of America's establishment, Harvard Law School.... Having graduated, he returned to Chicago to work as a civil rights lawyer, and to lecture at the University of Chicago....
"Two further factors are crucial: his consensual style and his public use of faith.... He goes to great lengths to show that he has considered respectfully the ideas of his opponents, and tried hard to find such common ground as exists. In this he shares a talent with both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair....
"Evangelicals like Warren give Democrats hope that they might be able to narrow the divide between their party and evangelical voters, who are said to make up a quarter of the US electorate. The fact that Warren and Obama now consider each other friends suggests that Obama is already well placed to lead that reconciliation....
"...his calls for liberals to articulate a new moral vision, and to do so unfearful of faith, boil down to little more than a type of reheated communitarianism. A section of the American liberal left has long wished to move beyond the antiseptic language of individual rights and to reinsert into politics a moral vocabulary stressing responsibility and obligation. When Obama writes that Americans are troubled because 'they want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives,' he sounds rather like Alasdair MacIntyre, the communitarian philosopher. Obama, in common with such thinkers, wants a full vision of the good life to animate our understanding of politics. This is easier said than done."
Previous
Obama's faith plays crucial role in shaping his views: "Barack Obama suggests we should be on the lookout for consistency in the way that faith and moral values are applied in politics and public life. The presidential candidate argues this and other themes in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," the title of which is drawn from a 1988 sermon by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago....
"From Niebuhr, Obama said, 'I take away the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate these things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense that we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism.'....
"'We must talk and reach for common understandings,' Obama said, 'precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side. Such a view inclines Obama to attach positive values to a quality that many religious radicals disdain, compromise. He views compromise not as a negative, as inevitably a retreat from conviction or principle, but as a positive principle in itself and one that is fundamental to the American union. ...
"For Obama, faith means both answers and questions. 'There are some things I am absolutely sure about -- the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace." But faith also means modesty and caution. "All of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side."
'I have a deep faith'- Barack Obama [Chicago Sun-Times, 4-5-04 by Cathleen Falsani]: ["Attends: Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ."]
"'I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived.'... 'That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived.'...'I am a Christian.' the 42-year-old Illinois state senator and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate says...
[Interview question:] "'It's perhaps an unlikely theological position for someone who places his faith squarely at the feet of Jesus to take, saying essentially that all people of faith -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone -- know the same God.'
[Answer:] "TThat depends, Obama says, on how a particular verse from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me,' is heard.'"Obama's theological point of view was shaped by his uniquely multicultural upbringing. He was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white mother who came from Protestant Midwestern stock and a black African father who hailed from the Luo tribe of Kenya. Obama describes his father, after whom he is named, as 'agnostic.' His paternal grandfather was a Muslim. His mother, he says, was a Christian....
"In his 1993 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama describes his mother as 'a lonely witness for secular humanism.'...
"Obama earned a degree in political science from New York's Columbia University in 1983 and in 1991 graduated magna cum laude with a law degree from Harvard University. Since 1993, he has been a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School....
"Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion,' he says. 'I am a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I mean, I'm a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law."
Remarks of Senator Barack Obama - Call to Renewal Keynote Address: [Washington, DC Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 ]
"I appreciate the opportunity to speak here at the Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference.... I think all of us would affirm that caring for the poor finds root in all of our religious traditions – certainly that’s true for my own.
But today I’d like to talk about the connection between religion and politics.... I do so because, as you all know, we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible and discuss the religious call to environmental stewardship all we want, but it won’t have an impact if we don’t tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.
For me, this need was illustrated during my 2004 face for the U.S. Senate. My opponent, Alan Keyes, was well-versed in the Jerry Falwell--Pat Robertson style of rhetoric that often labels progressives as both immoral and godless.
...Mr. Keyes said that, “Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.... I had to take him seriously. For he claimed to speak for my religion – he claimed knowledge of certain truths.... I answered with the typically liberal response in some debates – namely, that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can’t impose my religious views on another....
For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines....
Conservative leaders, from Falwell and Robertson to Karl Rove and Ralph Reed, have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church....
I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.... This religious tendency... speaks to a hunger that’s deeper than that – a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. ...
I speak from experience here. I was not raised in a particularly religious household. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself....
I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; it is an active, palpable agent in the world. It is a source of hope. [just for today or for eternity]
... that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts. You need to come to church precisely because you are 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 your difficult journey.
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.
The path I traveled has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans – evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at a turning point in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives them.
Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced... others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.
In other words, if we don’t reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, Jerry Falwell’s and Pat Robertson’s will continue to hold sway.
More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – 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. Imagine... King’s I Have a Dream speech without reference to 'all of God’s children.' Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. ...
I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws; but I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity....
I think we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys, and give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished. But my bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman’s sense of self...
...secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. ... our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize the overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. ...
Some of this is already beginning to happen. Pastors like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like my friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality....
....given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
And even if we did have only Christians within our borders, who’s Christianity would we teach in the schools?... Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy?...
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 to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
This may be difficult for those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. ... 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; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.
Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion.... Even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, a sense that some passages – the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity – are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life. ...
Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation – context matters.... Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat.... And one can envision certain faith-based programs – targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers – that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems....
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