Deconstructing a Barack Obama Gaffe

Over recent weeks, Senator Barack Obama has been criticized because of words he used with a group of supporters in San Francisco that seemed to trivialize the faith of small-town Americans. This article has been written to explain this criticism.

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There are many people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. I used to be spiritual but not religious. Before that I was religious but not spiritual. It is a ridiculous life, the latter. Praying every morning to nothing. But having seen each side of that coin, I can say from experience, they're both a little odd.

Spirituality or, equivalently, faith manifests in courage, but there is no courage in simply believing in God. A belief has to translate into an action – otherwise, it's meaningless. Connecting faith into the world, through religion, is the only way to vet the authenticity of belief.

This doesn't matter for most people. A private citizen has private faith. Vetting authenticity is nothing more than a parlor game, because no one cares. But as a public citizen, as a candidate for President, vetting a belief in God becomes important. People care. So Senator Obama goes out of his way

to remind people that he is Christian. Obama works twice as hard as other candidates to reassure people of his religion. One reason is that fifteen percent of this country still thinks he is Muslim. The other reason is because his faith is missing traditional signs of authenticity, mainly because his journey to faith was different than most.

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If you've ever heard Barack Obama speak about religion, he comes across very well – that is, if you like your speeches on religion to be clinical and detached. He's reasoned and seems to have a good answer for everything. But that's exactly his problem. I have a friend, Vincent, who is African American, goes to a black church and is devoutly Christian. Whenever I ask him to explain things like the concept of the Trinity or how it is that Christ died for our sins, he starts sounding silly. But that's how I know his faith is real, because it doesn't make sense to me.

My parents were my early templates for faith. They're devoutly Hindu and at thirteen, when I went through my first bouts of atheism, I naturally approached them with my questions. And just like Vincent, when measured against any normal standards of intelligibility, my parents’ responses sounded silly. But when I ridiculed them politely, to my surprise, they did not budge. Ever since then, I've recognized faith in people who don't make sense.

When Barack Obama speaks of his religious faith, he makes sense. This is exactly the reason to question whether his faith is real.

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Barack Obama communicates a kind of faith that is new in the public sphere of politics – a rational faith. It's an almost paradoxical term, though. Rationality and religion are normally looked at as polar opposites. There is a new breed of people that subscribe to this form of faith – a faith that is grounded in skepticism.

Senator Obama has been very open about his early religious doubt. His faith was cultivated over time through a journey of questions and answers. It was not until 1988, after hearing a speech at his church, that he became a believer. I can relate to this. Not the 1988 part, but the journey. I was born into a faith and have ended up there again. But in the interim, my faith took some detours, the kinds of detours not taken by the likes of my parents.

My parents are like a lot of people who didn't want, need or have the time to try to resolve existential crises. They skipped right past rationalizing their beliefs into careers, marriages and having skeptical children like me. This is a common religious trajectory for those who grow up practicing a majority faith. My parents grew up as Hindus in India, but this idea applies equally to a lot of Christians in this country. My parents had no reason to question what they were taught. Everyone they knew believed the same.

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I was bequeathed their same faith when I was born. I was handed this fragile ball of a religion. Pristine. But being a Hindu in this country, I had few people with whom I could share this ball of beliefs. As I got older, I stopped valuing it and one day I guess I decided to see if it could bounce. Turns out it could not bounce. What it could do as I found out, was break into pieces. A lot of pieces. All of them were questions my parents could not answer to my level of satisfaction.

So I started searching for answers to my questions on my own, through conversations and books. Over time I ended up rebuilding my faith from the ground up, questioning everything until I found the right words to soothe my doubts. Where my parents took leaps of faith, I ended up building bridges, and we both ended up at seemingly the same spot. We both have the same religion, at least in name.

But what I can see now is that my parents were rewarded for their lack of curiosity. What they got in return was a virginal kind of faith. Innocent. They believe things that seem absurd – very sincerely. What I got in return for my spiritual deconstructionism was the ability to explain faith convincingly but at a price.

What I've missed out on is an authenticity – the innocence of faith. My religious identity has been around the block. I've tried out a lot of beliefs. Within my faith, there is a jaded wisdom, but it is like Humpty Dumpty, if you could have put him back together again. From a distance it looks just like normal faith, but if you get closer you'll notice it's not. First of all, there is the glue and the cracks, but there are also some pieces missing. The pieces that did not fit into my explanations. The pieces I didn't like.

My faith is a rational faith. I can be questioned about it, and I have answers to give. Good answers too. They sound convincing. But if I'm ever confronted by a part of Hinduism that I have yet to properly understand, you'll find me at a loss for words. And within myself, you'll find me hesitating and questioning my belief. Sometimes I wonder if my faith is in God or in my ability to rationalize my belief in God. If it is the latter, then my faith rests on rationale instead of courage, which means it is not really faith at all. It's humanism.

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Until now there has only been one way to politically (meaning for the purpose of running for political office) legitimize faith. In this country that faith is Christianity. To legitimize it, one must passionately denounce those who veer from it. But that makes sense. Any religion can be interpreted to be about love and tolerance. It is in the ways that each religion chooses to ostracize individuals in society that they distinguish themselves. So it is that Christian legitimacy has become about not tolerating homosexuality or those who have abortions. That is the test, because it distinguishes religious people from humanists.

Barack Obama is attempting to rid politics of this kind of religious acid test. But in its place, he is not offering any alternative test that demonstrates the courage of his religious convictions. In that way, I find it hard to distinguish him from a humanist.

A few weeks ago, in San Francisco, this religious vagueness came back to haunt Senator Obama. What he said that day is that there are people in this country who never question their beliefs and, in tough economic times, look to their faith for strength. Their faith includes excluding people, and he denigrated that tendency. To people who have questioned their beliefs, there is nothing wrong with his statement. But since his candidacy must also appeal to people that do not, his statement became a mistake.

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