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The Christian Science Monitor - July 16, 2007
Barack Obama: Putting faith out front
How the Illinois senator came to embrace religion in his life?
By Ariel Sabar
Chicago: On a recent Sunday, the magnetic pastor who led Barack Obama to Christianity was at his usual perch on the dais here, a South Side mega-church where a plaque beneath stained-glass depictions of the African-American struggle reads "Unashamedly Black, Unapologetically Christian."
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., in a casual short-sleeve shirt, preached about Martha as a "single saint," urging unmarried women to draw self-esteem from faith rather than men. He took blacks to task for what he said was their silence on domestic violence, homophobia, and the "illegal, untested, insane war in Iraq, started by a C-student draft dodger."
It was at Trinity United Church of Christ here, in the late 1980s, that Senator Obama says he found religion. Raised in a secular household, with ancestral roots running from Islam to Baptist to atheist, Obama had grown up a skeptic. But Mr. Wright's blend of scripture and social action resonated with Obama, then a young community organizer in black neighborhoods ravaged by steel-mill closings.
And when Wright preached one Sunday about the sustaining power of hope in the face of poverty and despair, Obama says he found himself in tears.
"The questions I had did not magically disappear," Obama wrote in his recent book, titled "The Audacity of Hope" after Wright's turn of phrase, of the day four years later when he made a formal commitment of Christian faith. "But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."
More than the other Democratic candidates for president, Obama has made faith a centerpiece of his campaign.
He has warned the left against ceding the mantle of religion to the evangelical right. He speaks of the church as an abiding force in American public life, from the Boston Tea Party through the abolitionist and civil rights movements. He suffuses his speeches with biblical allusions – "I am my brother's keeper" is a favorite phrase. And he has cast his generation of black leaders as modern-day Joshuas, after Moses' successor, who led the Israelites to the Promised Land.
Many of Obama's political views are "an outgrowth of his reading of some of the seminal parts of the Bible about doing unto the 'least of these' just as we would have done unto Christ," says Joshua DuBois, the campaign's director of religious affairs, paraphrasing verses in the book of Matthew. "He takes very seriously the numerous passages in the Bible that talk not only about poverty, but of people of faith taking God's words and extending them beyond the four walls of the church."
But as Obama promotes faith as a means of uniting a diverse America around a shared set of values, he has at times found himself in a political minefield. To the left are liberals uneasy with religious intrusions into politics; to the right, conservatives who have questioned his Christianity and denounced his ties to Wright's Afrocentric church.
Obama's childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia was a swirl of faiths and cultures. His father, a black Kenyan economist, was raised Muslim but was an atheist by the time Obama was born. His mother, a white Kansan, had Baptist and Methodist roots but viewed organized religion with a gimlet eye, wary of how often it cloaked intolerance.
"Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example," Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, recalled in a phone interview. "But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways."
In their house, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad-Gita shared shelf space with books on mythology. His mother viewed them all through the eyes of the anthropologist she was. Religion for her was "just one of the many ways – and not necessarily the best way – that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives," Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," published in 2006.
After his mother was remarried, to an Indonesian Muslim, and the family moved to Indonesia, Obama went first to a Catholic academy and then a public Muslim school open to students of all beliefs.
But he was largely indifferent toward religion until he moved to Chicago in 1985 for a job organizing impoverished South Side residents in campaigns for better jobs, schools, and housing. As the recent college graduate went from church to church to enlist clergy in his causes, he heard an oft-repeated refrain: What church do you belong to?
"He really came here with a very strong passion about how can we change things, and he understood the churches as being a vehicle for doing that," recalls the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of the Saint Sabina Church, a Catholic church on the South Side, who has known Obama since his early days in Chicago. But he also "realized that with some churches there would be a credibility issue if he were organizing churches but didn't have a home church."…………..
Wright impressed Obama, and by 1988 the younger man found himself in the pews, listening to parishioners clap and cry out as Wright spoke of "the audacity of hope" in times of suffering, Obama writes in his bestselling 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father." In Wright's words that day, Obama glimpsed the deeper meaning he had been searching for in his work with the South Side's poor, who often had little to go on but faith.
"In that single note – hope! – I heard something else," Obama wrote. "At the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story."
Four years later, after returning to Chicago from Harvard Law School, Obama joined Trinity and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith. Wright later married Obama and his wife, Michelle, and blessed the births of their two children.
By his own admission, Obama's conversion was "a choice and not an epiphany." It owed as much to spiritual yearning as to a recognition of the power of the black church to change lives and society.
"What moved me was the role all the congregations I worked with played in the life of the people I was working with," Obama said in an e-mail to the Monitor. "What touched me was how faith bolstered them against heartache and disappointment and kept them going."…..
Obama and his advisers have said that his faith has motivated legislation meant to benefit the poor, the uninsured, and minorities. In the Illinois state Senate, Father Pfleger recalls, Obama sponsored measures to clamp down on high-interest "payday loans" in poor neighborhoods and to require Illinois police agencies to record the race of motorists they stop as part of a state effort to monitor racial profiling. He also pressed for a bill requiring police to videotape interrogations of murder suspects, as a safeguard against coerced confessions.
At a speech last month at the annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference in Virginia, he offered his most detailed list to date of programs he said should spring from "our faith, the Word, and His will." They range from a new service corps for disadvantaged youths and a program to have nurses teach low-income mothers good parenting to more jobs programs for ex-convicts and more venture capital for minority-owned businesses.
Elsewhere, he has preached a version of his church's critique of black "middleclassness." He told a crowd in Selma, Ala., in March that his generation of blacks should strive for more than just "some of that Oprah money."
"Materialism alone will not fulfill the possibilities of your existence," he said. "You have to fill it with the golden rule. You've got to fill it with thinking about others."
Last year, he and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, sponsored a successful bill to let people in bankruptcy continue to donate money to their places of worship.
Obama's advisers say his open faith and personal narrative are political assets as churchgoers grow increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Bush. "The ultimate swing voters right now are moderate Catholic voters and moderate evangelical voters," says Shaun Casey, professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington and an Obama campaign adviser. "There are more opportunities for Democrats with them than there have been in about 20 years."
In addition to Mr. DuBois, the campaign has faith-outreach workers on staff in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. It holds conference calls every week with religious leaders in the early primary states. And it has staged a half dozen "faith forums" in New Hampshire, where voters, local clergy, and campaign staff trade views on the proper role of faith in public life.
A Time magazine poll released Thursday found that more voters see Obama as a strongly religious person than they do every major presidential hopeful but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts whose Mormonism has drawn extensive news coverage.
But whether that public perception translates into votes, even among the 1.2 million members of Obama's own denomination, has yet to be seen…………
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0716/p01s01-uspo.html
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