Presidents' Religion and Ethics from George Washington to Barack Obama"
BARACK OBAMA’S INAUGURATION AS PRESIDENT
The premise of this chapter is a simple one: take away Barack Obama’s religious commitment and he would be a very different person, not the acclaimed moral leader that he was when he came to office. Put in terms of theology—God is, for him, the “ultimate meaning of meaning,” what the philosopher of religion Paul Tillich called the Ground of Being. Of course, Obama is first of all an activist whose morality is reinforced by faith claims about hope. At the same time, the new leader’s response to religious questions is not just emotional but reflective and probing. This chapter is not an attempt to systematize his pattern of belief critically as much as to narrate the ins and outs of its development. Speaking as a Christian he professes to conform to the standards of the nation’s faith in God, what is commonly known as civil religion. The question is how, and with what nuances?
Most of all, the new president was expected to avoid the mistakes of Nixon in Watergate or Clinton in Monicagate. But this negative barrier is not the end of the matter for a leader who acknowledges that in the end God is sovereign over the world and human life. Although the new president moved slowly in choosing a home church in the capital city—where his attendance could bring large crowds and create security problems—he already had chosen his inner circle with whom he was sharing in conversation and prayer. It included Jim Wallis of the Sojourners movement, Bishop T.D. Jakes of the Potter’s House (megachurch) Church in Dallas, Kirbyjon Caldwell of the Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas (and also the father of the present pastor of Trinity Church in Chicago, Rev. Otis Moss, Jr.), and Joel C. Hunter, pastor of Northland (megachurch) Church in Logwood, Florida. Obama’s ecclesiastical heritage was reflected in the fact that three of the five were African Americans.
In a prayer service before the public ceremony at the inauguration, Dr. Hunter had prayed: “Barack Hussein Obama ... by faith, we call forth the personal qualities of the Holy Spirit that your family and country will need in you: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’ [Galatians 5:22–23] ... Through your leadership, Mr. President-elect, may God bless the United States of America in a way that makes us a blessing to the whole world. Amen.”
In this chapter, we will consider Obama’s faith experience before he ran for president, his view of the relationship between church and state as he campaigned for the highest office in the land (in particular, as expressed in the Jeremiah Wright controversy), and the hope and optimism that he sought to renew in the country during financial recession. Running for the highest office in the land he offered different faces to various constituencies as his audience projected their own best images on his piety. Obama has written no systematic text on religion or theology that one can consult. At the same time he is more knowledgeable about world religions than most of his predecessors in the White House. To deal with current issues, he has renamed the White House Agency for Religion the Office for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership. To lead it, he chose Joshua DuBois, a twenty-six-year-old Pentecostal minister who was part of Obama’s staff during his election campaign. Kirbyjon Caldwell remarked of the president: “While he may not put ‘Honk if You Love Jesus’ stickers on the back of his car ... He has a desire to keep in touch with folk outside the Beltway, and to stay in touch with God. He seems to see these as necessary conditions for maintaining his internal compass.”
The inauguration of the forty-fourth president of the United States was a glorious victory celebration for the supporters whose votes had brought the new leader to Washington, D.C. His coming to power dramatically fulfilled Martin Luther King’s dream—even though much remained to be done in race relations. Now an African American occupied the highest office in the land for the first time in the nation’s history. It was high symbolism when the new head of state invited one of the assassinated leader’s associates from the Southern Leadership Council, Reverend Joseph Lowrey, a Methodist African American, to give the benediction at the close of the inauguration ritual. Reverend Lowrey opened his prayer by reminding his hearers of the crusade that his earlier generation had waged successfully in the name of God.
“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray ... And while we have sown the seeds of greed—the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity in the complex arena of human relations; help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance. With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors ... when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy, say amen.”
The benediction faithfully summed up the new president’s hopes and faith. Pastor Lowrey was expressing the message that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have delivered to the nation if he had still been alive.
A JEWISH VOICE
Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, was in the nation’s capital on Inauguration Day. He especially had come to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the swearing-in of the nation’s new leader. The clergyman described his state of mind as follows: “I wish my father and mother had been alive to experience the joy and incredible relief that went through our country as Barack Obama took the oath of office.” Lerner wanted to say to them that things will be all right now. They will never be as bad again in the country as they have been during forty years of imperialist war, the undermining of civil liberties, me-firstism, and materialism.
Lerner reflected that there was much to be appreciated in Obama’s inaugural speech. Eight years of the systematic undermining of human rights of citizens would come to an end. There would be renewed transparency in government. Important for the liberal rabbi was the new chief executive’s acknowledgement that the United States is a country of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. Finally, there was an affirmation of the common good—a reaffirmation of judging outcomes in terms of results.
“I don’t know who Barack Obama will turn out to be as president,” Lerner wrote. “The new president is not a savior.” The rabbi does not see him as a leader possessed of the vision and courage of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi. Rather, Lerner views the new head of state as a politician, and a good one who can do a lot of good, much more good if citizens can find the right ways to support what is good in him. The rabbi concluded that “the joy and hope of these [inaugural] moments remains with me to this moment.”
In his writings, Rabbi Michael Lerner—who earlier had been consulted and publicly praised by Hillary Clinton while her husband was president—makes a crucial distinction. He contrasts what he calls the “Left Hand” and the “Right Hand of God” as follows: “That very yearning for a world based more on love than on domination over others, for a world in which people respond with awe and wonder rather than with a purely utilitarian attitude toward other human beings and toward nature, is the core of a religious and spiritual tradition that I call the Left Hand of God. Those who belong to this tradition see God as the Force in the universe that makes possible transformation from a world based on pain and cruelty to a world based on love and generosity ... the Force that makes possible a world of nonviolence, peace, and social justice.”
In Rabbi Lerner’s analysis, the Left Hand of God stands in marked contrast to a view of God as a powerful avenger, the Right Hand of God—“the Force that will overthrow evil through superior power, the Force that seeks to exterminate enemies and suppress dissent.” This vision, often expressed in apocalyptic terms, sometimes conveys the mistaken idea that evil can be wiped out by one more war or by imposing rigid commandments about how to live; citizens are to be forced into goodness by a word from above. Ethics and religion are to be imposed from above.
Rabbi Lerner observes: “Religious triumphalism—‘Our God will emerge as the real God at the end of history, and all the rest of you will get your deserved punishment’—is not confined to right-wing Christianity. It is as prevalent in some parts of Judaism, Islam, and many other religions ... The task of building an alternative to tough-guy thinking, muscular religion, and domination-as-the path-to-security is going to be challenging for just this reason: embracing the Left Hand of God will require us to get over our fear of the cynical realism that surrounds us and resonates with the fear inside us ... [We need to] build a society based on the loving and compassionate teachings in Torah, the Prophets, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, and many other religious traditions.” The perennial danger is hubris!
The rabbi’s description of the right hand could apply even in more secular analysis. Ted Sorenson, one of John Kennedy’s closest confidants, reflected on the threat of right-hand forces: “This is an unprecedented mess. By many measures, no incoming president will have inherited quite such a sack of trouble in decades. You have to have not only a sense of confidence but apparently big ego—you have to be almost a fanatic. An aspiring politician not only has to look at everybody else running for the office against him and believe that he is as good as they are. He needs to think not only he is as good as they are but that his ideas are better. And that he can fix what nobody else can fix.” In fact, the challenge of the time was not simply a secular one—economic and political. World view and ethics were at stake in the decisions that the new incumbent in the White House sought to bring about.
There were other more positive (left-hand) views: “President-elect Obama has power of his own ... I will not exaggerate the importance of a single personality, but Obama has become a global symbol like none I can recall in my lifetime ... This is a rare moment in history.” So the Newsweek commentator, Fareed Zakaria, had observed while the president-elect was choosing his Cabinet. “At this time and for this man, there is a unique opportunity to use American power to reshape the world. This is his moment. He should seize it.” As the new leader battled for passage of emergency recovery measures in Congress, it was clear that the fight for the programs for which he had campaigned would be no “pushover.” The old Clinton-vs.-Gingrich battle lines seemed to emerge as congressmen voted almost entirely along party lines.
The thesis of this chapter is that the new president has a carefully thought-out view of the relation between church and state as well as between religion and politics. This was clear in his choice of the clergy who participated in his instillation in office. Like his mother, the forty-fourth president is willing to learn from a variety of religious traditions; unlike her, he is anchored in one particular faith. The biblical monotheism he espouses remains a radical and revolutionary outlook and has been so from the time that it was accepted in the Jewish community and polytheism was denied: “Thou shalt have no other gods.” The Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses. There is only one deity, all wise and all powerful, the Lord of history and the judge of all men’s deeds. Biblical monotheism puts the history of human life on earth, evil, and eternal destiny in a particular context. Truth is affirmed not just on the grounds of reason but of revelation in the biblical writings.
DEMYTHOLOGIZING OFFICE: THE TEMPTATIONS OF POWER
What did the change of leaders in the United States of America signify in deed and not just in rhetoric? The name of God had been invoked at all earlier presidential inaugurations in the past. It had also been employed for millennia by kings and emperors at their coronations! Would the nation’s power be exercised without hubris and vainglory in the new Obama administration? What were the differences and similarities between a democratic republic like the United States and a monarchy or dictatorship? The answer may not be as simple as it first appears to be! Ray Price, earlier a member of an unsuccessful president’s entourage (Richard Nixon) when Eisenhower’s vice president was first considering becoming the successor to the general, made a significant observation in a memorandum he sent to the candidate: “Selection of a president has to be an act of faith. It becomes increasingly so as the business of government becomes ever more incomprehensible to the average voter. That faith isn’t achieved by reason; it’s achieved by charisma, by a feeling of trust that can’t be argued or reasoned, but that comes across in those silences that surround words.”
The same advisor was sure that “People identify with a president in a way they do with no other public figure. Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of a leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of the avenging Furies thrown in. They want him to be larger than life, a living legend, yet quintessentially human.” The presidential office and the officeholders—a succession of some forty men—in their own person and belief thus reflected and symbolized the ethos of their respective eras in their successes and failures—Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Obama has understood that from the outset, the United States presidency has carried heavy symbolic religious significance; this continues to the present. George Washington understood this reality when he added to his inaugural oath of office, after swearing on the Bible, “so help me God.” Amid times of crisis—defeat and tragedy as well as victory—Americans identify uniquely with their president. They blame or praise him as an icon of their most profound longings and fears.” Let him (a president) at once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country.” So observed Woodrow Wilson who often is seen as standing at the beginning the modern presidency. In Richard Nixon’s case, the symbolic legacy turned sour and bitter. Only after a few months in power, Barack Obama was being assailed in a new way for his policies and actions.
If the forty-fourth president succeeds in the face of the daunting challenges that confront him, his admirers will project a whole series of positive symbols and stories on his person. In Washington’s case, these included the cherry tree incident—“I cannot tell a lie!”—that was spread by Parson Weems’s eulogy. That the general prayed in the snow at Valley Forge seems not to have been the case, academic researchers claim. Lincoln was eulogized as a rail splitter and was probably portrayed as more overtly pious than he was in real life—at least so his law partner, William Herndon, believed. It is in violent death by assassination that presidents have been judged to be martyr-heroes of sacred and eternal significance, most notably father Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan’s stature increased geometrically when he survived an assassination attempt in good spirits.
How are we to evaluate Obama’s chances in the face of enormous obstacles and dangers? His rhetoric amid the solemnities of inauguration had turned austere. His hearers no longer cried out in masses, “Yes we can!” There would be great difficulties ahead, he told them, but in the end the economy would be righted and foreign relations improve. Obama has acknowledged the reality of religious pluralism: “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.” But he has also argued in defense of civil religion’s place in the national traditions of office (as distinguished from institutional religion): “Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to ‘the judgments of the Lord.’ Or King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech without references 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.”
OBAMA’S INAUGURATION AS A KEY TO HIS FAITH
Obama’s choice of clergy to lead at his inauguration exemplified his beliefs and helped observers to identify his position and program more clearly: “Pastors, friends of mine 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 our good 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 ... Across the country, individual churches like my own and your own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”
All of these spiritual leaders are seen as embodying a significant measure of ethical wisdom and religious maturity—the Left Hand of God—in a new generation of clergy. Moreover, they have highlighted aspirations that have been present in Obama’s life. One thing that was really significant about the forty-fourth president was that he was explicit about his own understanding of the positive role of religion in public life, one that he knows first hand from his experience in the black commuity. Explicitly he clearly affirmed the separation of church and state. Faith ought not to be (and in the end, cannot be) imposed by the government from above. For his inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2009, the new president chose Reverend Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Southern Baptist Church in California, to give the opening invocation. Warren had never endorsed Obama’s candidacy. Nonetheless, the new president honored him as a leader in a new generation of churchmen who have come on the national scene. Their contribution can be classified under three rubrics: the cultivation and empowerment of personal life, establishment of community ties and worldwide social activism, and a sense of ultimate destiny—what in religious language is often called “eschatology.” They have common interests with the new president and employ the resources of the communications revolution on which his campaign was based.
Rick Warren was introduced by Time magazine to its readers as a leader whose goal is to change the world. It portrayed him as a jovially super-active preacher, insatiably curious, and one who was riding the newest wave of change in the evangelical community. The magazine’s writer was not mistaken when he credited Warren with loosening the hold of an older generation of clergy among Christians, enabling believers to graduate from a domestic political force into global benefactor. His leading book, The Purpose-Driven Life, rivaled in sales those that Obama has authored, and he led an entourage of thousands of pastors whom he was helping to revive their congregations. Most outstanding, even at a time of economic crisis, he directed Christians into vast new projects of social action in the struggle against AIDS and poverty internationally.
Warren prayed: “Almighty God, our Father ... today, we rejoice not only in America’s peaceful transfer of power for the forty-fourth time, we celebrate a hinge-point of history with the inauguration of our first African-American president of the United States. We are so grateful to live in this land, a land of unequaled possibility, where the son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership ... Give to our new president, Barack Obama, the wisdom to lead us with humility, the courage to lead us with integrity, the compassion to lead us with generosity ... When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us. And as we face these difficult days ahead ... Help us to share, to serve, and to seek the common good of all. May all people of good will today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy, and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet.”
Following Warren’s opening prayer, the first African American in the succession of presidents placed his hand on the same bible that Abraham Lincoln had used nearly a century and a half earlier—and made his sacred pledge. The chief justice who administered the oath stumbled over the prescribed words; Barack Obama did not.
Earlier in the day, before the swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol, and at Obama’s request, Bishop B. T. Jakes from the Potter’s Wheel (a black Pentecostal megachurch in Dallas, Texas) had led in a private prayer service at St. James Episcopal Church, the traditional “church of the presidents” located across from the White House. Jakes’s sermon focused on the book of Daniel. He sought God’s blessing for the new president, who would be entering into a place comparable with the fiery furnace described in the book of Daniel, one that had been heated seven times hotter than usual because of the Babylonian king’s hatred for the Hebrew captives who had defied him. Like Warren, Jakes had not endorsed Obama during the campaign for office; he had been a personal friend of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while they were in office.
Obama chose to emphasize his own theme of unity. On the day following his inauguration, a special service of worship that included Jews, Muslims, and Hindus was held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The new president had selected the head of the Disciples of Christ churches, Reverend Sharon Watson, a female exponent of interfaith cooperation, to preach.
One may ask—why should the new president’s tenure be framed with prayers and other civil religious ceremony? A philosophical (not just a historical) explanation can be given. The French existentialist philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, identified a religious view as one that holds that “God and the world are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be lived with.” Mystery, in this case, does not imply meaninglessness but a reality too full and wonderful to be encompassed simply in argument or concepts alone. Finally, the question about the ultimate meaning of human life is not just a partisan but an existential issue. The wisdom of God is greater than human folly, St. Paul argued. Human answers remain incomplete and are often articulated in symbol and story.
The German refugee theologian, Paul Tillich, claimed that God is not just a being among other beings, but Being Itself. This may be a relevant distinction in explaining the theism of the larger part of American religious life under the Jeffersonian polity of separation of church and state. Buddhism, by contrast, centers on an ultimate emptiness, beyond all distinctions. (It has a “church” but no ultimately determining personal deity.) There have been prophets, reformers, mystics, saints, and martyrs, in a variety of traditions whose witness to hope, faith, and goodness has significantly moralized public life in their time. In the United States, Lincoln believed that he was in the grip of forces greater than himself, and Washington believed that his military victories were providential. The prayer that God bless America on the inauguration of a new president was more than an empty call in a time of crisis. How the relation between mystery and knowledge is interpreted in a change of leaders in the White House is a crucial issue.
APPLICATION: A NEW PRACTICAL POLITICS
Of course, the pressing issues did not center just about religious symbolism; instead, ethics was joined with faith—what Tillich called “ultimate concern”—in the nation’s history. Brian Urquhart, former undersecretary-general of the United Nations, reflected at the beginning of the new administration: “A fog of know-nothing ideology, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, incompetence, and cynicism, has, for eight years, enveloped the executive branch of the United States government. America’s role in the world and the policies that should shape and maintain it have been distorted by misguided decisions and by willful misinterpretations both of history and of current events. That fog is now being dispersed, and the vast intellectual and managerial resources of the United States are being once again mobilized.”
Wishing to be reassured that the fog of misguided decisions and misinterpretation was really being dispersed, Americans liked to know what their new president was doing as they sought to evaluate his achievements and character. Writing of the first thirty days, as she had for a succession of earlier presidents, Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew pointed out that Obama —unlike Bill Clinton—did not begin his tenure in the White House by holding endless meetings; he refused to clutter up his days in this way. He is not a micromanager on the pattern attributed to Jimmy Carter. His chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, and his former campaign manager David Axelrod share responsibility for managing the day-to-day details of his administration. An aide told Drew, “There’s a somberness and an intensity on his day that’s extraordinary. I saw it occasionally in the campaign, but there were always light moments and banter; there’s a funny side to him. Now he’s focused and determined in a very serious way; it’s a little sad.” Drew is sure that from the outset, one of the new president’s first intentions was to show the country that George W. Bush does not live in the White House anymore.
As the drama of inauguration gave place to day-by-day sober responsibilities, Obama’s career was at a new stage. Aspiration for office was replaced by the exercise of power and rule. Unfortunately, fate had not been kind to him, and events did not follow in the pattern that he had expected when he had campaigned for office. The world economy was collapsing, and a recession was fast turning into depression internationally, not just in the United States. Certainly, Obama’s fundamental values remained and he showed determination on the course that he had set. He had promised enactment of universal health care; now he began discussion of how it could be delivered, taking pains not to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton administration. His intention to support international efforts to control global warming (by reversing the Bush policy) drew a positive response from religious leaders. An effort to change the sources of energy over a period time would affect the auto industry (already in crisis), and the new administration would subsidize scientific research and education and tackle immigration problems. A new president, who as a boy had lived in a Muslim-majority country, would need to deal with Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
What was going on in the large could be summed up by saying that there was a shift away from Reaganomics to Obamanomics. Ronald Reagan had preached national renewal on the premise that “government is the problem,” as it limits personal freedom and initiative. He looked for religious support from the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell. Obama, thinking in more communitarian terms, rejected the radical individualism of this point of view on both political and religious grounds. Practically, as the new president, he had little choice but to initiate major government intervention as he faced reality and sought to solve problems.
What was clear was that morality and not just economics was at the root of the subprime mortgage collapse. In religious terms, it could be called “sinful.” The financial crisis had gotten out of hand because federal regulation was ineffective and impotent. It would prove to be no easy matter for the new administration to restore confidence. Nobody seemed to trust anybody else. Franklin Roosevelt’s dictum in an earlier era, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” was relevant. Confidence would have to be restored before the flow of money would begin again throughout the financial system. The second Bush administration had lived in denial throughout much of its time in office. Obama would substitute a much-needed realism.
OBAMA’S CHARACTER
In evaluating Obama’s course of action, it is important to hold in mind that only on January 20, 2009 did the forty-fourth president enter the White House. Although his ethical convictions and doctrine of hope were on the record from his books and campaign statements, his economic and foreign policy directives were still being developed. Obama’s daily foreign policy briefings informed him that without recovery at home, the crisis abroad could skyrocket out of control. Whenever he approached pressing problems in international relations, age-old religious conflicts seemed to turn up to haunt his efforts.
The question of Barack Obama’s persona had been widely probed and debated in the national press as he campaigned for the presidency. Writing just before the opening of the Democratic National Convention in the last part of August 2008, David von Drehle described the five faces of Barack Obama: black man, healer, radical, novice, [and] the future.” He has been called a “window into American psyche,” the commentator wrote. “Pieces of Obama are open to interpretation because so few of them are stamped from any familiar presidential mold.” Von Drehle concluded that four of the faces of Obama posed threats to his victory ... his race, his irenicism, his faroutness, and his newness. At the same time, the commentator argued that what he was calling “the fifth face” expressed positive promise: “Obama’s banners tout CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN, and this slogan cuts to the heart of the task before him. The key word isn’t change ... Will they [Americans] come to believe that this new doctor, this charismatic mystery, this puzzle, is the one they can trust to prescribe it?” Von Drehle concluded that the key is to believe. Which face would Obama wear as president?
Along with the idealism expressed in The Audacity of Hope, there was also an accompanying pragmatism about the strategies of the new head of state. “Vices: Craps and Poker!” which appeared in Time magazine while he was running for office was intended as a spoof—albeit a serious one. Both Obama and John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate were known to gamble. In order to make friends and gain political influence, Obama, for example, while a member of the Illinois state legislature, played a watchful, careful game of poker in back rooms; the stakes were generally low. McCain—more sensationally and dramatically at times—won big in craps at the public gambling table. He is the greater risk-taker, Time reported, and seeks to impress colleagues.
The writer further noted that in the political arena, as in poker, Obama has held his cards close to the chest, calculating game strategy carefully. It is a stance that has carried over into national politics. McCain, by contrast, had more dramatically moved in and out of the spotlight, rising and falling and then rising again in popularity on his “straight talk express.” Was this a legitimate comparison? A range of political observers judged that it was.
At an earlier point in Obama’s activist career, it was Saul Alinsky’s analysis of power relationships that provided the ideology for his reformist undertakings. Alinsky’s legacy lingers on. In particular, he had advised his readers: “When we talk about a person’s lifting himself up by his own bootstraps, we are talking about power. Power must be understood for what it is, for the part it plays in every area of our life, if we are to understand it and thereby grasp the essentials of relationships and functions between groups and organizations, particularly in a pluralistic society. To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control.” Alinsky advocated a strategy of working behind the scenes, not just frontal assault, a lesson still reflected in Obama’s approach.
While at Harvard, the president-to-be had been elected editor of the prestigious Law School Review, the first African American to be so honored. At the time, there were widely recognized tensions between left and right in the school, and Obama moderated between the sides. Throughout his career, his political philosophy has carried a semi-religious reflection and probing of the American dream. Acknowledging its insights as distinctive and unique, he has campaigned for political reform with a post-partisan approach that seeks to uplift the tone of national debate. From the outset of discussion, he accepts the tradition that the United States has proved to be a land of opportunity where success depends on hard work and not on a citizen’s place in a class system—in spite of slavery.
Obama points out that much of the country’s civil legal code has its roots in its religious heritage: “As a biracial product of a multiracial family, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.” At the same time, the president to be has explicitly disavowed being a champion or symbol of post-racial politics. Instead, he proposes that Americans view their nation on something like a split screen. On the one hand, they need to hold in view the just, multiracial society that they seek, and on the other, the reality of an America that is not yet just. While at Occidental College, it was Roger Boesche (who taught political thought) who had a powerful positive influence, guiding the young Obama out of a self-absorbed teenage period. After college, when he worked in Chicago as a community organizer, it was his supervisor, Jerry Kellman, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, who was most influential. Obama was seeking to motivate lower-class occupants of the Roseland and West Pullman areas on the far south side of the city, the largest concentration of black neighborhoods in the country.
STAGES ON LIFE’S WAY
Where was Obama in his own life journey and faith as he entered the White House? A diversity of answers have been given by admirers and critics. The crucial question is whether the new president was in control of his own deepest instincts, what is often called “inner demons.” What were the moral and religious qualities of his character? What criteria were applicable? Character measurement is, to say the least, difficult! One path of appraisal is to attempt to relate presidents’ “inner history” to the stages on the life’s way scheme developed by the psychologist of religion, James Fowler, teaching at Duke University. Fowler based his structural analysis on more than five thousand personal interviews that he had conducted. He set out his judgment following the stage-theories of fellow psychologists, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, and in particular Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. The premise was that persons proceed from stage to stage at their own pace.
Fowler defined faith as “an integral, centering process underlying the formation of beliefs, values and meanings that
(1) gives coherence and direction to persons’ lives,
(2) links them in shared trusts and loyalties with others,
(3) grounds their personal stances and communal loyalties in the sense of relatedness to a larger frame of reference, and
(4) enables them to face and deal with the limit conditions of human life, relying upon that which has the quality of ultimacy in their lives.” Our question is how his theoretical framework might illumine Obama’s career and actions.
The analysis begins with Primal Faith. Primal Faith forms before there is language, and it enables young children to undergo separation from their parents without undue anxiety or fear of loss of self. Fowler’s description then moves on to a second step, Intuitive-Projective Faith. This stage emerges with the acquisition of language. Imagination is stimulated by stories, gestures, and symbols. Representations of God take conscious form in this period.
Mythic-Literal Faith, according to Fowler, involves “concrete operational thinking”—a “developing ability to think logically emerges to help us order the world with categories of causality, space, time and number, sort out the real from the make-believe, the actual from fantasy.”
Synthetic-Conventional Faith, the fourth stage, “characteristically in early adolescence brings the ability to think abstractly and make sense of one’s world.” Some persons never reach it, through no fault of their own.
Fifth level: Individuative-Reflective Faith leads to such questions as who am I when I’m not defined by being my parents’ son or daughter, so-and-so’s spouse or the work I do? Persons question, examine, and reclaim the values and beliefs that have been previously formed in their lives. Eventually, a sixth level emerges: Conjunctive Faith. Often beginning in midlife, individuals embrace and integrate opposites and polarities in their lives, recognizing themselves as both constructive people and inadvertently destructive people.
Fowler’s final and highest stage is one of Universalizing Faith. “Beyond paradox and polarities, persons in the Universalizing Faith stage are grounded in a oneness with the power of being or God. Such persons are devoted to overcoming division, oppression, and violence, and live in effective anticipatory response to an inbreaking commonwealth of love and justice, the reality of an inbreaking kingdom of God.” In Fowler’s analysis, this stage includes an unswerving commitment and devotion (“calling” or “lifestyle”) that cannot be hindered or quenched.
Of course, psychological typologies are generalizations and must be treated with great caution. At what level can one place Barack Obama—the faith of the sixth stage or even the seventh? Negatively, it is clear that Richard Nixon’s life as well as the careers of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, in spite of the latter’s professions of faith, did not advance all the way up on the scale. Certainly, none of these stages applies only to Christianity. Gandhi and King are candidates for the highest level. How much can a ruling president follow their example in a post-modern world?
A LAW STUDENT’S EVALUATION OF HIS PROFESSOR
Seeking clues about the new president’s conviction, the evaluation of John K. Wilson, who studied at the University of Chicago Law School under Obama’s direction, remains important; it is based on personal contact: “Obama wears his religion on his sleeve, but he doesn’t shove it in your face. He embraces a government that doesn’t wear religion of any sort.”
“I am a big believer in the separation of church and state,” Obama has explained, but not in the separation of religion and politics. Personally, he denies an ideology of secularism that views religion as a purely private activity. If religion is not kept separate from politics, it would poison the common well of government. At the same time, Obama finds public discussion of faith issues of positive value, in particular, as positively it can be a way to close the gap between believers and non-believers.
Wilson concludes that Obama walks a delicate line while speaking honestly and openly about his religion, without trying to be a religious politician. “As someone brought up as a rational secularist, exposed to many religions but never indoctrinated into any one of them, Obama could have chosen a path rejecting religion. He could have rebelled against his upbringing and become a fundamentalist of the Christian or Muslim variety.”
Wilson judges that Obama’s perspective on God is a thoughtful, decent approach to religion. He rejects an either/or between hardcore devotion that will never hear the other side or a watered-down wishy-washy centrism that ultimately believes in nothing. Instead, he has found a third way that embraces an open mind with committed values.
Wilson has his own special take on Obama’s religious views: God is the great questioner who forces him to align his activity with his values. Viewing prayer as “an ongoing conversation with God,” he engages in it in order to take stock of himself and maintain his moral compass. In short, it is a way to check his own ego. “Am I doing this because I think its advantageous to me politically or because I think it’s the right thing to do?”
Jason Byassee has reflected: “One of the brightest points in Barack Obama’s rising political star has been his ability to talk about Jesus without faking.” In the midst of the political swirl of his campaigns for office, it remains a fair observation that Obama does not exploit his religion for personal gain.
In her research as a social scientist, Obama’s mother was interested in the history of religions. In this field, she found Joseph Campbell’s writings about myth and symbol an illuminating guide. Described sociologically, in terms that Obama’s mother would have understood, religion is cult, community, creed, and conduct. The University of Chicago, where Obama taught, has had its own distinguished specialists in the history of religions, including one of the greatest, Mircea Eliade. Of crucial importance in the long story of the sacred and holy is the so-called Axial Period of the eighth to fifth centuries BCE. It was the era of the birth of the world’s great religions, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, possibly Zoroastrianism in Persia (its prophet is the hardest of all to date), the Hebrew prophets in Israel, and the classical philosophical thinkers in Greece. Piety was internalized and morality spiritualized in vast regions across the known world in this period.
There can be little doubt that the legacy of the new president’s mother remains with him. It was she who gave him “a working knowledge of the world’s great religions.” He reports that Ann taught him “the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice, and scorned those who were indifferent to both.” He has never abandoned what he calls “my mother’s fundamental faith—in the goodness of people and in the ultimate value of this brief life we’ve each been given.”
Still Obama went his own way, accepting Christianity as it was practiced in the black community where he worked as an organizer in Chicago. “I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church and its importance in the community. And the power of that culture to give people strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people courage against great odds, and it moved me deeply.” Obama was seeking “a vessel for my beliefs. ... I was drawn to the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.” The black church also showed him that “faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world ... I had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held beliefs ... Without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned so some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same way she was ultimately alone.”
TOLERANCE: FAITH AND DOUBT
Wilson reflects: “It was not because he believed ... religion necessary for morality, or because he had some personal problems that he needed to cure ... For him, Jesus is not a magical creature to be worshiped blindly; he’s a real person to be imitated for his moral example ... faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world.”
The president has warned: “I think there is an enormous danger on the part of public figures to rationalize or justify their actions by claiming God’s mandate ... I think that religion at its best comes with a big dose of doubt.” Echoing his mother, he affirms: “I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and 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 that there’s an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make these values lived.”
Obama continues to express the belief that underlying world religions is a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself but for the common good. In short, he is skeptical toward all assertions of absolute and full knowledge of reality. “I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up a suspicion of dogma, and I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.”
Wilson concludes: “Obama is a rationalist who genuinely respects religion, giving him enormous power to sway a vast number of Americans ... Of course, Obama has never wavered from his principled stand for individual freedoms.”
