In a religion-and-politics twist, the Christian identity of Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has been doubted, examined and challenged during the election season.
Obama himself has repeatedly stressed his faith. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life,” Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) told Christianity Today in January 2008. “Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.”
Both presidential nominees, Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), identify as Christians. But Obama’s religion has become a source of controversy in the election, with widespread rumors that he is a Muslim and criticism of his membership in a Chicago black church headed by a fiery minister.
Gustav Niehbuhr, a religion professor at Syracuse University, blames this controversy on ignorance and politics. “He’s got an unusual-sounding name, and he did have a Muslim father, and that provides people grounds to say he’s a Muslim,” he said. The ignorance also comes from Americans’ lack of knowledge about the religion of Islam, Niebuhr added.
Rumors
The rumors that Obama is a Muslim have spread like a virus across cyberspace. Since 2007, an anonymous e-mail has been circulating the Internet accusing Obama of being a Muslim. Variations of the e-mail say he attended a Wahabi — a strictly orthodox Sunni Muslim school — or madrassah — a Muslim seminary — in Indonesia. It also said he was sworn into office on the Koran instead of the Bible.
This e-mail has been frequently debunked, including by both www.snopes.com , one of the best known sites specializing in checking rumors, and by www.Factcheck.org , the best known political fact-check site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. In fact, Obama attended a Catholic school for two years and then a public school for two years while his family lived abroad. Factcheck.org called the e-mails “false appeals to bigotry and fear.”
But some surveys suggest the e-mail rumors could affect the presidential election. In a September survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 13 percent of registered voters said Obama is Muslim — up from 10 percent in March. About half surveyed said he is Christian. Almost half of Americans polled said they would be unwilling to support a Muslim running for president.
The rumors are rooted in Obama’s family history. Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. He was named after his Muslim-turned-atheist Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, who left when Obama was two. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, remarried — this time to an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetoro, a religious skeptic. When Obama was six years old, the family moved to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Obama returned to America at age 10, where he lived in Hawaii with his mother’s parents.
Faith
Obama has described his journey to Christianity as complicated.
His mother, an anthropologist, taught him about a number of religions.
“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,” he wrote in his most recent book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
Obama’s first serious brush with Christianity was as a community organizer in Chicago. He worked for the Developing Communities Project, a “faith-based grassroots organization.”
In that job, Obama visited different churches on the South Side of Chicago. Each time he met new church leaders they would ask which church he belonged to. His answer: None. Not until he found Trinity United Church of Christ, then headed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a former U.S. Marine and Navy medic from Philadelphia — and a fiery preacher.
On a Sunday in 1988, Wright delivered a sermon titled “Audacity of Hope,” which would later become the title of Obama’s second book. The sermon described a painting in which a woman plays a harp on top of a mountain. But upon closer examination, the woman is hurt and bloody, and there is only one string left on the harp.
“She dares to hope,” Wright preached. “She has the audacity… to make music… and praise God… on the one string… she has left!”
Obama was inspired to tears by the sermon. But his path to Christianity was long. “It wasn’t an epiphany,” he told Newsweek in summer 2008. “A bolt of lightning didn’t strike me and suddenly I said, ‘Aha!’ It was a more gradual process.” He was officially baptized at Trinity in the early 1990s, after he returned to Chicago from Harvard University.
Jerry Kellman, who gave Obama his first community organizing job in Chicago at the Developing Communities Project, witnessed Obama’s “process” first-hand. Obama’s faith became more concrete when he married Michelle Robinson, and even deeper when he became a father, Kellman said.
“I know few people whose understanding of theology is as good as Barack’s, even though he’s had no formal training,” Kellman, who is now a lay minister in the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, said in a telephone interview.
Wright
Obama’s close connection to the Rev. Wright and his church sparked a furor in the spring of 2008. Besides bringing Obama to Christianity, Wright also presided over his marriage and baptized his daughters.
A video of Wright was broadcast by ABC News in March and exploded into a news and talk-show sensation. In it, Wright suggested that the United States had some responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks because of its own policies and actions, such as the World War II atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He chastised the country for its history of racism and warfare.
“God Damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people,” Wright said. “God Damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”
The comments caused a public backlash, with calls for Obama to distance himself from Wright.
That reaction was prejudiced, suggested the Rev. Rick Hill, chaplain of the historically black church at Hendricks Chapel at SU. Traditional white churches don’t understand the black church, particularly its style of worship, said Hill.
“In general, you have to look at the image,” he said. “What is the white church’s image of the black church? In my mind: inferiority, emotional, unnecessary.”
Niebuhr, the religion professor, described the controversy as overblown. “In terms of his preaching style, and the excitement he can generate, that wasn’t all unusual,” he said. He rephrased Wright’s message: “The United States has strayed from its promise of equality for all, and in a situation like that, a benevolent god can’t bless a country.”
The backlash had consequences: It prompted Obama to deliver what’s become one of his best-known speeches, which discussed his views on race. And the Obamas resigned from the Trinity United Church of Christ in May, even though Wright was no longer its minister.
Politics
In his presidential campaign, Obama has stressed that he believes in the separation of church and state. But he has also called for an expansion of the faith-based initiatives started by President George W. Bush.
Obama has been careful to include other religions in his speeches and stresses the need to work together. In his “Call to Renewal” address, he said the United States isn’t just a Christian country anymore — that it includes Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and even nonbelievers.
“No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack,” Obama said in the June 2006 speech. “They don’t want faith used to belittle or to divide.”
(Megan Saucke is a junior with dual majors in newspaper journalism and political science.)
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