Obama and Religion Reconsidered

A few weeks ago, we saw Barack Obama lambasted for statements about race and religion issued by his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church in Chicago, Illinois. Subsequently, Obama gave a seminal speech, in which he distanced himself from Wright’s fiery and controversial sermons, while underlining his allegiance to his church and even to Wright himself, who he compared to a family member with whose political views you don’t always agree.

Not too long thereafter, in a speech he delivered in Pennsylvania, Obama explained the “bitterness” that some small-town folk feel in the face of economic deprivation, which might drive them to an exclusive, hostile and xenophobic form of belief:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

And this statement has provoked a veritable firestorm of criticism from all corners of the electorate and from the mainstream media. But why? What exactly is he saying here that’s so offensive? That the disenfranchised and disempowered are seeking other means of redress after the Establishment has let them down time and again? Who exactly is really offended by that?

This shouldn’t be news. And, in fact, it’s not. Since the time of this quote, public discussions of religion and its role in a presidential candidate’s life have reached a fever pitch (but, strangely, discussions of economics, guns or xenophobia have not). Criticisms leveled at Obama himself have ranged from accusations of secretly being a Muslim (as if such a thing were shameful) to being a “secular humanist” (again, shameful?) to being elitist and out-of-touch, as Hillary Clinton put it. Underlying all these strange accusations seems to lie the presumption that anything other than mainstream Baptist and Methodist Protestant religious belief would be antithetical to one’s ability to perform the duties of President of the United States.

But that’s decidedly not the case. One of the best-loved and remembered presidents in history, John F. Kennedy, was a Roman Catholic. Of the United States’ Founding Fathers—signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and members of the First Federal Congress—a large majority were Episcopalians or Anglicans (88%), Presbyterians (30%), and a large minority who called themselves “Congregationalists” (27%), a catch-all term for Protestants whose churches run their affairs independently from any other body. The remainder were Catholics, Quakers, Huguenots, Unitarians, Calvinists and Dutch Reformed.*

When people talk about their religion, many tend to do so in highly subjective terms: faith, spirituality, belief. These things are not measurable. There is no “vetting” process for them, nor can there be. Religion and faith are based on individual experience and, as such, are subject to debate and interpretation as soon as they enter the realm of language. Faith and belief are intensely personal experiences, not easily explained in words. Somehow, something integral to the notion of faith gets lost in translation.

Why, then, this pressing need to understand a candidate’s religious beliefs? How can something as deeply personal and individual as belief be expressed in the public forum? And more importantly, why should it be? Was Obama even attempting to do so? Clearly not—he was attempting to draw a link between some of the more virulent forms of extremism and hardship—and not just religion, but also social antipathy, economic wariness and fanaticism over firearms, but apparently those items do not warrant this sort of heated discussion.

This idea is not new, nor is it heretical. We all know it. But this fundamental truth of human existence is being perverted by attempts to portray something else—an incomplete understanding of religion by Obama, and, by extension, an incomplete understanding of morality. That’s reprehensible, since no one can presume to know Obama’s religious beliefs better than he himself.

Besides, to paraphrase the positions of Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens and a great many other atheist thinkers, the connection drawn between morality and religion is far more often theoretical than real. There is no link between how devout a person is and the morality of his or her behavior. You need to look no further than the headlines for evidence of this in America: Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Lonnie Frisbee, Ted Haggard, Phil Driscoll, any number of Catholic priests. And in other religions and in other countries, it’s much the same story. From the Pakistan-India Partition to the Irish insurrection against the British occupation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Gujarat riots, the Sri Lankan independence movement to the current situation in Iraq, fervent devotion frequently goes hand-in-hand with the most depraved excesses of violence, immorality and what a more religious person might call sinfulness. The purported connection between religion and morality is clearly a myth. In our hearts, we all know this to be true: just because a person publicly believes in God or acts like the devout follower of a religion, that in no way insures that he or she will behave in a moral manner. Nor will it even insure that he or she will be an effective leader. One need only look at our current President for evidence of that.

Let’s be honest for a second here. What we’re seeing is the violent reaction of the overly pious to a perceived offense and a public outcry for retribution. And if there’s one thing any religion does not tolerate well, it’s criticism.

Yet there is a continued insistence in both the public eye and the mainstream media that this discussion is relevant, somehow, because religion is perceived as the fount of all morality, and any candidate who does not exhibit mainstream religious values must therefore be suspect. The irony here is that Obama belongs to a very mainstream church and professes to believe in a very mainstream way. He is Protestant, a member of a very large Congregationalist church in a major city. His stated beliefs seem to line up very well with the vast majority of Americans: belief in a Christian God, belief that Christ is the Savior of Mankind, etc. The statements he made about small-town identity and the proclamations made by Wright have absolutely nothing to do with his own beliefs. Nor are they in any way even relevant to Obama’s own professed positions. Yet his sentences are now scrutinized by the media, various religious “experts” and assorted punditry for evidence of unbelief or a purported lack of faith.

Clinton and McCain have somehow exempted themselves from this sort of outcry, even though various critics have pointed out both of those candidates’ stilted religious connections. Clinton has seized the political opportunity and gone on the offensive, leveraging the public perception of weakness in Obama’s personal religion while deflecting rather weak criticisms of her own religious beliefs. And McCain is being largely ignored, even though he once attacked Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “evil”, though he counts amongst his supporters televangelist Rod Parsley, who calls for the eradication of Islam entirely (as if such a thing were even an option!):

“I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.”

After reading that excerpt, contrast it to some of Wright’s speeches. Is McCain’s relationship with Parsley not far more dangerous than Obama’s association with Wright? Wright’s unpardonable sin was to speak angrily about the continuing injustice of racial politics and the role of the black church in America. Isn’t Parsley’s statement a form of that very racial injustice that America hesitates to contemplate but Wright speaks of so openly?

Is it not time for America to sit down and rationally explore what it means to be American and what we expect of our presidents? Is America not, at heart, about personal individual freedoms? Should our Presidents not embody those same ideals? We’re no longer a wholly Christian nation, and “minority” religions are quickly growing percentages of the overall population. With each new Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Parsi immigrant, the United States becomes less and less a white, Protestant nation. Shouldn’t we acknowledge then that religious discussion just doesn’t add anything of import to politics? Contrary to popular belief, the separation of Church and State in America has always been a good idea. But America as a whole is moving in the opposite direction.

Isn’t it time we did something about that?

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