Barack Obama: Sheep or Goat?
Pastor Rick Warren welcomes liberal Democratic senator Barack Obama to his Saddleback pulpit.
Celebrity Senator Barack Obama uses the lingo of the Old Time Religion, but that doesn’t mean it’s his.
“All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.” (Matthew 25:32-33 NKJV)
The very popular Christian website Crosswalk.com listed among its top news stories of 2006 the controversial appearance of US Senator Barack Obama in the pulpit of Saddleback Church. He spoke at the invitation of Rick Warren, Saddleback’s pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life. At the time, I issued one of the few formal public criticisms of Pastor Warren for yielding “the sacred desk” to Mr. Obama. In addition to compromising the doctrinal integrity of an Evangelical pulpit, I warned that the event could be misread as both an endorsement of Obama’s liberal religiosity and his potential presidential candidacy.
Warren responded with assurances that he and Obama were only allies in the war against HIV/AIDS in Africa, and that he didn’t necessarily agree with the Senator on every issue. But later, on national television, Warren told CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer that Obama “has it.” He went on to clarify that Obama has what it takes to be a “good president” because he is a man of “good character.” Consider the endorsement made.
Since then, this story has only gained prominence. Obama’s rumored consideration of a presidential run in ‘08, his cross-country book tour and the utter infatuation of the liberal old-line media has made him a sensation. I’ll confess even I am attracted by his personal style, articulate communication and compelling life story. And, like so many others, I find him impossible to ignore.
The most interesting aspect of what is being called “Obama-mania” is how quickly it has penetrated the Evangelical community. During a recent home Bible study group which my wife and I hosted at our house, one of our friends said, “What did you think of that Obama at Rick Warren’s church? Looks like we finally may have a Democrat we can get behind.” Yet, when I asked this same woman how much she knew about Obama, she indicated she really knew nothing about him.
My impression is that there are millions of Americans like our friend; they find Obama appealing, but don’t know any more about him than his good looks, easy-going manner and gorgeous family. If first impressions can be lasting ones, Obama is in good shape among a healthy percentage of traditional Christians.
The Senator from Illinois says he is a Christian, but we’re not told exactly what kind. For this reason, I set out to research who and what Barack Obama is, but only as far as his faith is concerned. It was not my intention to explore his economic, social or foreign policies, except where they explicitly intersect with his personal religious philosophy. I’ll let the political experts look at those other things. I did look at his legislative record, but again, only as it manifests his religious beliefs.
The profile of Obama that emerged should be of interest to all traditional Christians, but particularly to Evangelicals. Obama has suggested one of his goals is to reach out to the evangelical community. He seems to be doing that at a fever pitch. And, whether or not he runs for president in ’08, there is no doubt Democrats will continue to use him as a point man to, in his own words, “engage millions of Americans in the larger project of American renewal.” (Read: “bring millions of Evangelicals back into the Democratic fold.”)
So, for the good of the whole, I present to you my findings on Barack Obama’s religious identity. While it may not tell you exactly what kind of Christian Obama is—it will tell you what kind of Christian he is not. Barack Obama is definitely not an Evangelical.
BACKGROUND
Barack Hussein Obama was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan Muslim father of the same name and an American secular humanist mother named Ann Dunham. While Obama’s father was raised in Islamic culture, he had become a functional atheist by the time he reached college. Despite his parents’ lack of religion, young Obama received his early education in both Catholic and Muslim schools.
Obama’s parents divorced when he was only two years old. Henceforth, the senior Obama was “almost entirely absent”[i] from his son’s life. Four years later, Ann Dunham relocated to Indonesia with her son to join her new husband Lolo Soetoro. A daughter, Maya, was born to the couple before their divorce. She returned to Hawaii where she went on to earn her MA in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama wrote of his mother, “She was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position paper liberalism.”[ii]
Obama’s mother was a huge influence in his life. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in October 2006, he said, “My mother—when I think about the values I hold most dear, they came from her.”[iii] In a speech given at a Moms Rising event in 2006, he said, “Everything that I think is good about me, I got from her.”[iv]
While Obama’s mother was a quintessential secular humanist, he told Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and Daren Briscoe, “[S]he was a deeply spiritual person, and when I moved to Chicago and worked with church-based community organizations, I kept hearing her values expressed in the church.”[v] Dunham died of ovarian cancer at age 53 before her son rose to national prominence.
For much of his childhood, Obama lived with his maternal grandparents. He describes them as having no religious faith. He says of his mother’s mother, she was “always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn’t see, feel, touch or count.”[vi] His maternal grandfather, who he describes as a “dreamer,”[vii] had an innate rebelliousness and a “complete inability to discipline his appetites.”[viii] Perhaps this influenced Obama’s own youthful experimentation with marijuana and cocaine.[ix]
While in Hawaii, Obama attended the exclusive Punahou School, a nominally Christian private school. Upon graduation, he went off to Occidental College in Los Angeles.
After two years, Obama transferred to Columbia College, the undergraduate wing of Columbia University in New York. He studied political science with a specialization in international relations. Following graduation in 1983, Obama worked for a year at a business-related publishing company, before moving to Chicago where he helped churches organize job training programs for residents of poor neighborhoods.
Obama left Chicago to study at Harvard Law School where he was elected the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He obtained his Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude in 1991. On returning to Chicago, Obama supported a voter registration drive, and then worked for the civil rights law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his federal election.[x]
RELIGIOUS JOURNEY
During his early years in Chicago, Obama says he was a religious “skeptic . . . wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”[xi]
Obama met the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. while attempting to recruit Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for a community organizing drive. The very liberal United Church of Christ denomination notes, “In a sea of conservative black churches, Trinity stands out in that it has welcomed gay members, done outreach to people living with AIDS and advocated progressive positions on many social issues.”[xii] Wright is the man to whom Obama has turned to “help him explain how his liberal positions jibe with his faith.”[xiii] Today, after 20 years, Obama still calls Wright his pastor, friend and mentor.[xiv]
It was under Wright’s tutelage that Obama made his public profession of Christian faith. This, in response to a sermon preached by Wright and entitled (like Obama’s recent book), The Audacity of Hope. For Wright and his church, the gospel is fused with the black experience in America. The church’s mission statement reads, “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.”[xv]
I don’t pretend to understand the agony blacks have suffered in this country, enduring the hideous barbarism of slavery, the cruelty of Jim Crow segregation and the pain of prejudice. Yet, Trinity’s reaction to these realities seems an anomaly, even by the several black leaders I consulted in writing this article.
Trinity also has “adopted the Black Value System,”[xvi] 12 “precepts and covenantal statements”[xvii] that form a sort of Ten Commandments-like code. The System’s preamble charges, “These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered.”[xviii] The second value, after “Commitment to God,” is “Commitment to the Black Community.” The eighth is “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” And the eleventh is “Pledge Allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System.”
This exclusive commitment to a cultural and national identity played a major role in Obama’s decision to identify himself with Christianity. He explains that he probably would have remained apart from any faith, “had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.”[xix]
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