Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton have coasted in
one important respect so far this election season: none of them has
had much practice fielding challenging questions about the policy
implications of their religious beliefs.
No such respite has been given to Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney,
who together get most of the “religious ink” in mainstream
reporting about the people competing for the Oval Office. Many
people would like to know: Why the double standard?
Disingenuous observers who claim that religion is a private
affair with no bearing on public conduct can be safely ignored
here, because they are usually too exasperated by the enthusiasm of
a devout few to notice the tenor of reporting on religion. Those
who argue that Huckabee and Romney have only themselves to blame
make a better case. After all, one of those men is an ordained
Baptist minister and the other wants to be our first Mormon
president.
But neither biographical detail nor Ronald Reagan’s fabled
courtship of the religious right a generation ago explains why
Republicans today are expected to disavow plans for an American
Christian theocracy while Democrats exhort the rest of us to
justice in stump speeches from inner-city pulpits.
One proposed reason for the mainstream reluctance to press
Democratic candidates about their religious beliefs is that many
big-time journalists treat religion as personal baggage. Add to
that the partisan angle: Because journalists typically vote
Democrat, they want Democrats to have an easier time with
any baggage than their Republican rivals, and shape
questions and stories accordingly.
So Democrats are entitled to the convenience of curb-side check
in, while Republicans are banished to the nether regions of a big
terminal, trudging endlessly through security checkpoints with
oversize luggage that skycaps are unwilling to relieve them of.
Why? Because one does not reward churchgoing union-busters who
never want to raise the minimum wage.
That metaphor-stretching interpretation misses the mark by
overlooking ignorance as an explanation for how people in newsrooms
behave. My suspicion is that Huckabee and Romney have double-teamed
the few neurons that most reporters allocate to recognizing
religious influence in life.
One result of this is that Rudy Giuliani can’t buy a religious
angle in wire service copy unless some hack salutes him for
supporting a “right to choose” that the church in which he was
raised considers a serious sin. For those of you playing at home,
the takeaway is that journalists understand ambition, but faith in
Jesus Christ leaves them befuddled.
INABILITY TO SEE beyond here to the hereafter explains why
journalists treat Hillary Clinton as a known quantity while lumping
devout Christians of any type with Muslim al Qaeda operatives in a
startlingly ecumenical “religion wing” of the monkey house that is
American politics.
If more journalists understood religion, for instance, they
would not be as quick to applaud Barack Obama for parading his own
ignorance of Christian history as though it were a merit badge for
deep thought.
When asked by a member of the editorial board of the
Chicago Sun-Times whether he was an evangelical Christian,
Obama said, in effect, “Yes and no. But that kind of nuance is a
black thing you wouldn’t understand.” You can judge for yourself
whether my paraphrase is fair: What Obama actually said was, “I
came to Christianity through the black church tradition.”
Did he mean the Christian tradition as mediated through black
culture? Nobody in his audience thought to ask. Someone familiar
with Christian history could have pointed out that Augustine of
Hippo was a 5th-century bishop in North Africa, Martin de Porres followed Jesus in 17th-century Peru,
and the Martyrs of Uganda held fast to their Christian faith in the
19th century. Francis Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria has a much better
claim to black Christian leadership than Al Sharpton or Jesse
Jackson.
But the scarlet thread connecting each of these people is a
person, not a common culture or a “black value system” of the
kind touted by Obama’s church.
Let it be remembered that although the African Methodist
Episcopal church, for example, has beautiful roots in the
19th-century anti-slavery movement, the Rev. Doctor Martin Luther
King, Jr. preached with equal felicity from any Christian pulpit
that would have him, without regard for the peculiarities of
Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Pentecostal theologies.
Let it be hoped that Obama’s theology, whatever it is, makes
room for what Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians: “All
of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with
Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor
free person, there is not male and female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus.” That assertion is one of the great catholic
statements in a collection of sacred books rife with them.
As smart bloggers like Ed
Driscoll and the appropriately named Cassandra have pointed out, we have reason to be
both curious and cautious about what Obama believes. The Pharisee
in me can’t help but think that what Obama has is not a “nuanced”
Christian faith but an unexamined one. Identifying too closely with
a “black church tradition” rather than the universality of the
Christian message gives short shrift to that divine imperative
known to Christian theologians as the “Great Commission.”
It also encourages separatism and strife. Smooth as he is, even
Obama can’t preach harmony on one side of the church door after
listening to racialist sermons on the other. We need more
journalists with faith and spine enough to address concerns like
these.
