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Gullible Gospel

By Sean Higgins on 8.15.08 @ 12:06AM

The Faith of Barack Obama
By Stephen Mansfield
(Thomas Nelson, 192 pages, $19.99)

Stephen Mansfield wants to believe that Barack Obama can lead this nation to a religious revival. He wants to believe it so badly in fact that he is willing to disregard his own reporting. Now that's faith.

Mansfield is the author of The Faith of Barack Obama, a book-length essay on the Democratic nominee's religious beliefs. In many ways it's a good book and, certainly, the subject is worthwhile.

It's just that Mansfield seems to be willing to give Obama every benefit of the doubt, no matter what the Democratic candidate actually says. How else to explain passages such as this one?

"The uncertainty that Obama's words inspire seems to be intentional," writes Mansfield. "Though it does not appear that he means to confuse, he does speak with a thoughtful lack of clarity."

EVER SINCE HIS star-making turn at the 2004 Democratic Convention when he said, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states!" it has been widely presumed that Obama is a deeply religious Christian.

The truth is a bit more complicated as Mansfield recounts, drawing on interviews, speeches and Obama's two memoirs. In fact it is not precisely clear what Obama believes.

Obama is, after all, the same man who, as child living in Indonesia, occasionally "accompanied [his Muslim stepfather] to a nearby mosque of Fridays and prayed at his side for the blessings of Allah," Mansfield notes.

That was just one part of Obama's polyglot religious upbringing. He also attended a Catholic school in Indonesia that included Bible studies. His mother and the maternal grandparents who helped raised him, one the other hand, were devout secularists.

His mother was also multiculturalist long before that was cool. She would go so far as to take young Barack to Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and Hawaiian burial sites to expand his education -- though not his spiritual awareness.

"Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring," Obama wrote in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope.

"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."

THE CONSEQUENCE of exposing young Barack to so many religions was that he came away with no faith of his own. After all, if all faiths were equally an "expression of human culture" then how could any one be the true path to salvation?

Only later as a young lawyer in Chicago did Obama join Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church and become a Christian. Yet even after that Obama is careful to say, again and again, that he did not give up his religious skepticism.

"It came as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions that I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the south side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Education, Barack Obama, Religion, Law