Is Sen. Barack Obama an agnostic? In light of the controversy
over Rev. Jeremiah Wright it may seem like a strange question to
ask. Agnostics tend not to get into public spats with their pastors
for the simple reason that they typically don’t have pastors. One
doesn’t expect a nudist to argue with his tailor.
Indeed, Obama has been identified with the black church and its
exuberant worship tradition ever since his starmaking turn at the
2004 Democratic National Convention. “We worship an awesome God in
the blue states!” he famously exclaimed.
Yet after Wright’s
recent appearance at Washington’s National Press Club, I
re-read the chapter on faith in Obama’s memoir, The Audacity of
Hope. I was trying to figure out how the senator could have
sat in Wright’s pews for two decades without being aware of the
pastor’s radical views (as he claims). After all, the title of the
book was taken from one of Wright’s sermons.
The chapter candidly recounts Obama’s transformation from
religious skeptic to Christian churchgoer under Wright’s tutelage.
What is striking about the story it tells, though, is what isn’t
there: any sort of claim to a truly religious epiphany.
That’s a key part of most conversion narratives. The skeptic
casts aside doubt and takes the proverbial leap of faith, embracing
the religion in all of its doctrines — even the more peculiar
ones.
Obama pretty clearly indicates that wasn’t the case with him. At
the end of the chapter Obama describes tucking his daughter into
bed and trying to answer her question about what happens when we
die.
“I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I
wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of
where the soul resides,” he writes.
No happy bedtime talk about heaven for this father.
OBAMA’S DOUBTS COME from his rather unique upbringing. A mixed-race
child who lived abroad for prolonged periods in his youth, he came
to the church late in life.
“I was not raised in a religious household,” he says. His
caucasian mother and the maternal grandparents who partially raised
him were only nominally Christian. The grandparents were skeptics
and they passed their secularism onto their daughter. And she in
turn passed it on to her son.
“Her own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in
small towns…only reinforced this skepticism. Her memories of the
Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones.
Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious
preachers who would dismiss three quarters of the world’s people as
ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal
damnation — and who in the same breath would insist that the earth
and the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and
astrophysical evidence to the contrary,” Obama writes.
He hastens to add that his mother did give him some religious
instruction, viewing it as “a necessary part of any well-rounded
education.” The Bible was placed on a shelf next to the Koran, the
Bhagavad Gita and books on Greek and Norse mythology.
His mother sometimes took him to church for Christmas. She also
took him to Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and Hawaiian burial
sites. As she held young Barack’s hand she explained that these
religious samplings required “no sustained commitment on my part.”
She was just broadening the young man’s mind by exposing him to
these superstitious rituals.
“Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain,
not its wellspring,” Obama writes.
“In sum my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the
anthropologist that she would later become; it was a phenomenon to
be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment
as well.”
THUS OBAMA GREW UP understanding most religions but not believing
in any particular one. He was taught to see all faiths as an
expression of the same phenomenon: humanity’s need to believe in
some divinely guided rules to live their lives by.
That being the case, how could any one religion be true?
Obama’s change began when he started a career as a social
activist in Chicago. The black community’s existing activist
network was heavily religious. It welcomed him but also noticed
that he was “removed, detached, an observer among them.”
For a time he felt he was consigned “to always remain apart.”
But over time he was drawn to join the congregation at Wright’s
Trinity United Church of Christ because he so admired the many
services the community provided to the poor and the struggling.
Obama says that he was “drawn to the power of the African
American religious tradition to spur social change…I was able to
see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge
against death; rather, it was an active palpable agent in the
world.”
He continues, “it was out of this intimate knowledge of the
hardship, of the grounding of faith in struggle, that the
historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith
doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish
your hold on the world.”
And so he was baptized in the church, with some reservations:
“It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had
did not magically disappear.”
THAT PROVED TO BE a problem for Obama when he ran for the Senate in
2004. His Republican opponent was the bombastic, erratic and quite
possibly insane black conservative Alan Keyes. Obama crushed him in
the general election, but says it was harder than it looked.
“[A]s the campaign progressed, I found him getting under my skin
in a way that very few people have. When our paths crossed during
the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge
to either taunt him or wring his neck,” Obama writes.
How did Keyes do this? By questioning Obama’s Christian
faith.
“Christ could not vote for Barack Obama,” Mr. Keyes once said,
“because Barack Obama has voted…in a way that it is inconceivable
for Christ to have behaved.”
It touched a nerve in Obama and he was by his own account
tongued-tied, irritable and tense during their debates. Keyes
prodded Obama on the question of biblical literalism.
How could Obama believe the Bible’s proclamation that life was
sacred and yet support abortion rights, Keyes would ask? Obama gave
“the usual liberal response” about separation of church and
state.
“[Y]et even as I answered, I was mindful of Mr. Keyes’s implicit
accusation — that I remained steeped in doubt, that my faith was
adulterated, that I was not a true Christian,” Obama complains.
Well, it wouldn’t have annoyed him that much if Keyes wasn’t
onto something.
