Brian Baute

The Faith of Barack Obama is well worth reading. It’s largely objective and unbiased, though the author makes it clear that he has significant disagreement with Obama on many religious issues. Some of the more provocative passages:

• “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.” He first saw this broad embrace of faith modeled by his mother. “In our household,” he has explained, ‘The Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites.” What his mother sought to embed in him was her view that “underlying these 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.” Thus, for Obama, Christianity is but one religious tree rooted in the common ethical soil of all human experience. (p. 55)
• As much as any other good that Trinity (United Church of Christ) offered Obama, it gave him a place to belong. Though he came to faith as a man, he carried teh soul of a boy who yearned for a father and a tribe to call his own. (p. 62)
• The (Senate election) battle with (Alan) Keyes came about through a process that caused some to label Obama “the luckiest politician in the entire fifty states.” Upon announcing his candidacy for the Senate, Obama joined a crowded Democratic primary field. Almost immediately, his two strongest opponents sustained fatal political damage…Obama won the primary and then faced Republican Jack Ryan in the general election…The looming campaign promised to offer a classic American political fight, made thrilling by the vast gap between the candidates in personality, principle, and money. Yet it was not to be. Weeks into the campaign, details of Ryan’s divorce from actress Jeri Ryan became public. The tales of bizarre sexual rituals, of a wife forced into degrading public sex in clubs around the world, was too much for Ryan’s “family values” image to sustain. Within weeks, he dropped out of the race, leaving his party in crisis. Then came Alan Keyes, admittedly dragged into the fray from Maryland by a desperate Illinois GOP scrambling at the last minute to find a viable candidate…Keyes never really had a chance. He was outmanned. He was outspent. He had entered the race far too late. When it was all over, Obama won with a margin of more than 40 percent of the vote…As Obama later concluded, “Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony.” (p. 82-86)
• Obama on separation of church and state: “And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in teh schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggest slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So, before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.” (p. 88)
• Obama on abortion: As columnist Amanda Carpenter complained in the staunchly conservative Human Events some months after Obama’s speech, “Senator Obama portrays himself as a thoughtful Democrat who carefully considers both sides of controversial issues, but his radical stance on abortion puts him further left on that issue than even NARAL Pro-Choice America.” Carpenter went on to explain that in 2002, Obama had voted in the Illinois senate against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies who survived late-term abortions…Despite even NARAL having no objection to such bills, Obama voted against the Illinois version in the senate. (p. 96)
• After the author compares Obama’s faith to the faiths of McCain, George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton: And then there is Obama. His face stands out among them all. It is black. It is under fifty in 2008. It is Christian in a nontraditional sense. It is Columbia and Harvard. It is progressive and social justice and the most liberal face of all. And his face, all the signs suggest, is the face of the future. Whether he wins the race in 2008 or not, Obama is what America is becoming. So he takes his place among the four faces of faith, and he publicly welcomes a chance to stand on the stage with McCain and Clinton and Bush. But the others are the faces of warriors past. He alone, he believes, carries the future. (p. 127)

It’s a well done, brief treatment (less than 100 pages dedicated to Obama himself before the really helpful comparisons to the faiths represented by Bush, Clinton, and McCain). I recommend it.