Obama's living God

By Niels C. Nielsen
professor emeritus, Rice University

In the 44th President's America, religion remains powerful socially and politically --for good or evil, to the present. Faith in God continues to show itself as a cultural determinant and not just a sectarian force. Obama's life story is incomplete without it. If we seek to secularize his presidency radically our view is reduced and truncated. The God that Obama honors is the liberating God of the exodus, a deity who leads his people out of captivity into freedom and order. This deity does not just undo the bondage of the past. He points the way to change, bringing good out of evil.

For their part, the North American Founding Fathers by one epoch-making blow chose religious freedom: they precluded any union of throne and altar, church and state by the First Amendment of the Constitution. The liberty that they championed as men of the Enlightenment opened a unique creative place for faith in the new nation. But, alas, the Founders did not abolish slavery. It was the ghost at their council table. In spite of their high purpose even in refusing religious establishment they did not envisage the possibility of a black chief executive. Now this has come to pass!

Human rights advocates seek to extend tolerance and liberty worldwide. The 44th President is among them. To his credit he knows more about world religions than virtually any other chief executive who has resided in the White House. Part of the reason is that he was not a cradle Christian. In the United States liberation came not from the Founding Fathers--Washington and Jefferson -but from the legacy of two martyrs---in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King's preaching. Obama's father and his stepfather were both nominal Muslims. His mother was an agnostic anthropologist who introduced him to a variety of religious traditions. What makes her son distinctive in particular is that he approaches religion from below, not from the point of view of establishment apologetics from above.

The president-to-be accepted Christian faith while a social worker in Chicago. His model in particular is Abraham Lincoln, a president who spoke of Americans as a half chosen people and was most concerned that he was on God's side, not that God should be on his side. John K. Wilson, who studied law under Obama has remarked that for his teacher God is the great questioner who forces him to align his activity with his values. Viewing prayer as "an ongoing conversation with God" he engages in it in order to take stock of himself and maintain his own compass. In short, it is a way to check his own ego.

Obama's religion, by his own report, supports him in remaining firm in his convictions and conscience. At the same time he denies being simply an ideological liberal or conservative. John Byasee who knew him at the University of Chicago reflected, "One of the brightest points the Barack Obama's rising political star has been his ability to talk about Jesus without faking it." The President's response to religious questions is not just emotional but selective and probing. He has a carefully thought out view of the relation between church and state as well as religion and politics. Moreover, he understands that as president he must speak not just confessionally but more inclusively and universally.

Obama has reflected about his career as a social organizer in Chicago: "Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world. I had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held beliefs....Without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned...to always remaining apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same way she was ultimately alone." He chose not to remain so. What he found, in the words of the French philosopher Pascal, was "not the God of the philosophers but, the living God"--the liberating God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Niels C. Nielsen is professor emeritus of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University. His new book is "God in the Obama Era: Presidents' Religion and Ethics from George Washington to Barack Obama."

By Niels C. Nielsen |  March 18, 2010; 12:46 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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