In a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Steven Waldman, founder of the online site Beliefnet made several interesting observations about the current climate of political campaigning. Now admittedly, there is a long tradition of Republican sniping at “liberal” concerns that they’ve wedded themselves too closely to evangelical Christianity. And Waldman is surely right to suggest that one cannot simultaneously lionize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s involvement in Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Civil Rights movement, then deny contemporary fundamentalists and evangelicals their right to wed their faith to their versions of political action. That is entirely right, and should be fairly settled among thoughtful members of the religious and/or political left.
But Waldman extends that allegation of religious hypocrisy and double-standard in a strange way when he turns to the Obama campaign. Here is what he said in his editorial:
Religious Double Standard for Obama?
Read Sen. Obama’s campaign material and ask yourself: if a Republican had included this in their official literature, wouldn’t there have been a firestorm?
From a pamphlet distributed in Kentucky, next to a big headline, COMMITTED CHRISTIAN: “Obama forged a profound connection with the people of these communities [in Chicago]. At their encouragement, he visited a local church one Sunday. That day Obama felt a beckoning of the spirit and accepted Jesus Christ into his life.”
On his South Carolina material, a section suggestively titled, “Called to Bring Change,” declares, “We do what we do because God is with us.”
Finally, a large panel, entitled “Called to Christ,” states: “Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.”
Sen. Obama has good tactical reasons for doing this. First, it reminds people he’s not Muslim. Second, it helps show he’s not an effete, liberal secularist. Third, it helps him to appeal to evangelicals.
But I do think that Democrats are no longer in a position to reflexively complain about Republican ads invoking religion.
There is no such “reflexive complaint” among Obama supporters. Indeed, what Waldman’s comments fail to take seriously is the massive change in the political climate that separates ’60s-style activism from the second presidential campaign of the 21st century.
Here, I think, is a better way to pose the question of the right relation between religion and politics as it relates to Obama’s long-suffering presidential candidacy. I propose the following as a sort of genealogy of the current confusion.
1) The two main political parties in the United States today are fairly loose coalitions, and since Reagan’s presidential victory in1980, the coalition that fractures worst loses.
2) Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians have been perceived to be a central piece of the center-right Republican coalition since the creation of the “Moral Majority” in 1979.
3) The landscape, both religious and political, may well be shifting in reaction to the second Bush presidency, signaling the possibility of different coalitions, the emergence of new and different “religious” issues, and different ways of imagining the relationship between religion and politics in the United States.
In short, religion no longer “belongs” to the political right (if it ever really did—Waldman was right about that), but it is a matter worth puzzling over, this question of the Illinois Senator’s religiosity, the question of why the only candidate whose religiosity has been at issue in this entire campaign thus far is Barack Obama’s.
There is far more to this question than the trivializing interpretations which suggest that we are simply glimpsing vestiges of multiple prejudices in US culture: ageism for McCain; sexism for Clinton; racism for Obama.
What bears further thought is why. Why do suspicions that Barack Obama is a Muslim persist (and why are they framed as “suspicions”)? Why do questions regarding his willingness to wear a lapel pin, and thus questions about his patriotism, continue to resonate? Why do incendiary comments by the now-notorious Reverend Wright continue to stick to the Obama campaign no matter how clearly he distances himself from them and from their speaker?
One regularly hears that the question for Obama is whether lower-and-middle-class voters can be convinced that “he is really like them.” The implicit notion seems to be that “being like them” involves being Christian, somehow. There are two ways to interpret this belief, both of them disturbing.
The first is that America is still imagined as a strictly Christian nation and thus a presidential candidate must be Christian, in some recognizable way, to be considered viable (with all due sympathy to Mitt Romney). That flies in the face of current demographics, especially among the post-Baby Boomer generations to whom Obama speaks with eloquence and power.
The second is that “being like us” is indeed a code for race, that being like us involves being white and Protestant and thus if one is not white, but “merely” mixed, then one somehow can’t really be Christian.
It is more than a little sad that mainline Christians are not speaking more forcefully and with outrage against either of these scarcely-veiled, noxious beliefs. And it is the apparent net of beliefs that may well lie behind Steven Waldman’s decision to ignore all of this that is most disturbing about his remarks.
