Recall to Renewal

I've held off on posting about this little speech of Barack Obama's that you might have heard about. Not necessarily due to any time crunch or lack of interest. Indeed, it's been rather high on my mind the last week or so. It's just that, when I read the speech, at once there were conflicting sentiments. On the one hand, it's a great speech that puts a point squarely to the progressive side of the electorate about how we view faith in America and also to those who already hold dearly to their own faith alongside a progressive worldview. But on the other hand, there was something that just bugged me a little about the speech. And I didn't want to be overly critical of a speech that genuinely has so much good going for it.

So leave it to the fairest blogger of them all - Amy Sullivan, donning her semi-MSM writer's cap instead of a more pedestrian blogging beanie. I think Sullivan captures everything positive I can see in Obama's speech:

Obama's speech, delivered to an audience of the frustrated religious left, was not a tactical plan for electoral success in November or in 2008. It wasn't a "We are too religious!" rebuttal to Republicans. It was, for the first time in modern memory, an affirmative statement from a Democrat about "how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy," as Obama put it. John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Mario Cuomo in 1984 each gave seminal speeches on faith and Democratic politics, but they were primarily concerned with defining their own faith?Catholicism?in terms of what it was not.

Obama's goal was different and larger. The speech worked partly because the senator speaks with easy-going confidence about his faith, weaving spiritual phrases into his speech without needing to announce them to his audience as so many of his colleagues do ("This debate about tax cuts reminds me of that verse from the Book of Hebrews ?"). But more important, he doesn't recount the story of his conversion in order to establish his religious bona fides; he does it in the service of a broader argument. And he doesn't defend progressives' claim to religion; he asserts the responsibilities that fall to them as religious people. Americans are looking, Obama said, for a "deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country." He started that conversation. A few others are joining in. It's time for everyone else to catch up.

Without a doubt, there's an ease and humility that gives Obama the authenticity that serves him well. And as one who had problems with Obama's reaction to those issues of disagreement, with him, it's refreshing to hear him offer up a further explanation of how he views those situations in hindsight:

I want to give you an example that I think illustrates this fact. As some of you know, during the 2004 U.S. Senate General Election I ran against a gentleman named Alan Keyes. Mr. Keyes is well-versed in the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson style of rhetoric that often labels progressives as both immoral and godless.

Indeed, Mr. Keyes announced towards the end of the campaign that, "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved."

Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama.

Now, I was urged by some of my liberal supporters not to take this statement seriously, to essentially ignore it. To them, Mr. Keyes was an extremist, and his arguments not worth entertaining. And since at the time, I was up 40 points in the polls, it probably wasn't a bad piece of strategic advice.

But what they didn't understand, however, was that I had to take Mr. Keyes seriously, for he claimed to speak for my religion, and my God. He claimed knowledge of certain truths.

Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, he was saying, and yet he supports a lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination.

Mr. Obama says he's a Christian, but supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life.

And so what would my supporters have me say? How should I respond? Should I say that a literalist reading of the Bible was folly? Should I say that Mr. Keyes, who is a Roman Catholic, should ignore the teachings of the Pope?

Unwilling to go there, I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.

But Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.

Now, my dilemma was by no means unique. In a way, it reflected the broader debate we've been having in this country for the last thirty years over the role of religion in politics.

The closing of Obama's speech also contains a great example of a pro-life voter writing then-candidate Obama asking for a bit more civility on the issue of abortion:

"Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you."

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be "totalizing." His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.

But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor went on to write:

"I sense that you have a strong sense of justice...and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason...Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded....You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others...I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."

Fair-minded words.

So I looked at my website and found the offending words. In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.

Re-reading the doctor's letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words. Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.

Taken together, these are great examples of someone who, for lack of a more eloquent phrase - "gets it." And given that, it's difficult to muster the energy to quarrel with something that offers so much insight ... something that can and should be read by any and every Democrat, anyone thinking they might vote Democrat here and there, and possibly more than a few of our Republican friends as well.

Yet there's still a nag that I have with Obama's speech. And I do so as one who holds religious legalisms in rather low esteem. But my problem with the speech is this:

It's still too politically correct.

For a speech that contains as much authenticity as it does, what undercuts that very strength to some degree is that for a man who considers himself Christian, there isn't much discussion of the one-on-one relationship between Obama and Jesus Christ mentioned in the speech. In fact, the majority of instances we get that name dropped into the speech, it's in a negative sense - in the context of Alan Keyes' ill-tempered suggestion that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama." To be fair, there is one reference to Christ in a positive context:

Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts.

You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.

You need to embrace Christ ... not I have embraced Christ. That might not bug me so much except for this reference to what Obama did embrace in his own conversion:

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith.

That's not a statement that I eagerly anticipate attacking, so I offer this very gingerly ... but "affirm my Christian faith" doesn't strike me quite the same way as something like "to commit my life to Christ" or "to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior."

Furthermore, I'm doubtful of even Barack Obama's ability to crack open the iron seal placed on evangelical Christian churches by the religious right if he's not willing, able, or maybe capable of addressing the centrality of Christ that many Christians (one would hope all) do have in their lives.

There are numerous cracks in the foundation laid by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and others in aligning Christian conservatives with the Republican Party. More and more, Christians of conservative, liberal, and progressive stripes together, have realized that their faith compels them to be good stewards of this earth ... to care for the least among us (even through public, collective means) ... to place a primary need to change hearts and minds before grabbing the hardened hammer of the law in the hopes of furthering Christian aims in a nation that most of us realize we share with plenty of people who don't believe as we do.

But a skittishness about addressing what one's relationship to Christ means to us isn't very convincing. Especially when it comes to those discussions about issues that do genuinely divide us. It may yet be in the interest of those issues - the very ones that more and more Christians despair that their religion is being limited to - that a greater discussion is needed in order to move beyond the merely spiritual to those who aren't afraid to drop the name of Jesus Christ into polite, everyday conversation.

I watch just about every interview done with Joel Osteen when it happens upon my television. I'm not sure why. Well, one reason is that Osteen is my pastor. But the interviews themselves always go horribly. Whoever's doing the interview just cannot believe they have in front of them a leading Christian pastor who doesn't address the issues of abortion, gay marriage, and immigration in a rotating order for sermon topics. As if that's all Christianity is these days. Who needs the cross? ... the empty tomb? ... the Holy Spirit? We can, it seems, simply replace the entire Bible with a few planks of the Texas Republican Party platform. That sure would do my wrist some good by keeping me from lugging a Bible to church.

But even for a church not like Osteen's Lakewood, that stereotype doesn't speak to the fullness of Christian life. It doesn't even break the surface of it. And that brings another painful realization to the fore - that there's nobody to thank for that other than Falwell, Robertson, and Reed. People who place primacy of the Republican Party to Jesus Christ should never have been allowed the platform they had to do so. But the way to combat that is to simply show up on the same platform, share your own testimony, witness your own faith, and run the race Christ compels you to run in a way that, God willing, speaks louder.