Barack Obama's spirituality

I guess everyone has read or heard about the US presidential nominee Barack Obama’s religious affiliation — that he is a Baptist — and about the inflammatory statement the pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ made on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 damming America and that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.

But the coming of the New Year having made most of us reflect on spiritual matters, I thought I’d reveal some information I gathered from the internet on Mr. Obama’s thoughts on religion and related topics. Much of the data I got comes from the column written by Cathleen Falsani, a Chicago Sun Times columnist.

Obama had been attending Trinity United Church for 20 years, the church where he married Michelle, and had their two daughters baptized. He told Cathleen, “I have an ongoing conversation with God . . . I’m constantly asking myself questions about what I’m doing, why I am doing it.

“I have a deep faith, I am rooted in the Christian tradition,” he told Cathleen. “I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.”

Obama, who gave the interview just after his winning in the primary election, said that essentially all people of faith know the same God, but as a Christian, he would abide by the Gospel of John where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Obama’s theological viewpoint was shaped by his uniquely multicultural upbringing. He was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white mother who came from Protestant Midwestern stock and a black African father who came from the Luo tribe of Kenya. His father was “agnostic,” his grandfather, a Muslim, and his mother, a Christian.

His parents divorced when Obama was six years old, and he and his mother and her new husband, a non-practicing Muslim, moved to Indonesia, where he lived until he was 10 and attended a Roman Catholic school.

His mother’s views was that underlying the different religions was “a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself, but also for the greater good.”

Obama finished political science from Columbia University in New York in 1983 and in 1991 graduated magna cum laude with a law degree from Harvard University. Since 1993, he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

Those experiences and his multi-religious childhood, he told Cathleen, affected how he expresses his faith.

“Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion. I am a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I mean, I’m a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law.

“I am a great admirer of our founding charter and its resolve to prevent theocracies from forming and its resolve to prevent disruptive strains of fundamentalism from taking root in this country.

“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 don’t think it’s healthy for people figures to wear religion on their sleeve as a means to insulate themselves from criticism, or dialogue with people who disagree with them.”

Obama said he has a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Which is why he accepted the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s altar call one Sunday morning, about 16 years ago. This point in his life may be referred to as his being “saved, transformed, washed in the blood.”

He clarified that his public profession of faith was “not an epiphany. . . It was much more of a gradual process for me. I know there are some people who fall out. Which is wonderful. God bless them . . . I think it was just a moment to certify or publicly affirm a growing faith in me.”

He still attends the Trinity United Church which has a new pastor after Wright’s retirement. In a separate article on the internet, Obama said that he did not think the church to be “actually particularly controversial.” The Reverend Wright, he said, “is like an old uncle who says thing I don’t always agree with.” In fact Obama credited the pastor for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Wright, wrote Cathleen, became Obama’s confidant soon after he came to Chicago in 1985 as a $13,000-a year community organizer, working with a number of African-American churches in the Roseland, West Pullman and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods that were trying to deal with the devastation caused by shuttered steel plants.

He started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job-training programs, or after-school programs for youth, or making sure that city services where fairly allocated to underserved communities. It was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual view of religion deepened.”

Two of his advisers are the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in the Auburn-Gresham community on the South Side, and state Sen. James Meeks, who is also the pastor of Chicago’s Salem Baptist Church. The day after Obama won the primary in March, he dropped by Salem for Wednesday night Bible study.

He reads the Bible, though not as regularly as he’d like, but he does find time to pray. “It’s not formal, me getting on my knees. I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. I’m constantly asking myself questions about what I’m doing, why I am doing it.”

“The difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize,” he told Cathleen of Sun Times. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that if people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they’re going to hell.”

Obama does not believe he, or anyone else, will go to hell, writes Cathleen. But he’s not sure if he’ll be going to heaven, either.

“I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die.” When I tuck in my daughters at night, and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.”

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