From the Huffington Post:
Barack Obama: Closeted Non-Believer?
by Ali A. Rizvi“Before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles now,” said the young first-term Senator from Illinois in his speech to Call for Renewal, a liberal Christian group. “Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles!”
It was June 2006, and it wasn’t long before Barack Obama started to draw the wrath of evangelicals like James Dobson for the controversial speech. Earlier, he had asked…
For the rest of the article, click here.
It’s a bomb-throwing article that has a number of distortions in it. But I won’t address Mr. Rizvi’s article itself. As a Christian, I’m much more curious as to the nature of Obama’s profession of faith than in how or why non-believers reconcile themselves to it. I’m not interested in it in a policy sense, since confessing Christian presidents have made both good and bad decisions in office, while presidents who were decidedly heterodox or even deist in their belief systems likewise have had the same mixed records. The story of the intersection between belief and policy in the Oval Office is a complicated one that actually involves a lot more historical speculation than you’d think.
As a Christian, I’m much more interested in Obama’s profession of faith in a theological and confessional sense, because to me those matters are ultimately more important than anything or everything he does as president — as astounding as that may sound to a non-believer. The excerpts the article takes from his autobiography give something of a glimpse into it, but his rather startling interview with Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani in 2004 gives the clearest view of what Barack Obama actually believes:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/falsani/726619,obamafalsani040504.article
Here’s the full interview itself, via Steven Waldman at Beliefnet:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/obamas-interview-with-cathleen.html
First thing I thought when I originally read this however many years ago was that Obama was pretty damned brave to open up so thoroughly about what he believes. This is the sort of topic that generally makes politicians very nervous, which is why most of them stick to calling themselves “Christians” or “Jewish” and leaving it at that, at most thumbtacking a few general pieties onto boilerplate statements lauding the civic religion that is the actual baseline rule for any political aspirant in the U.S. But Obama gives very in-depth responses to Falsani’s questions, which is why I refer to the interview as “rather startling” and applaud Obama for his candor.
As to Obama’s faith claims themselves, it’s clear that the elusiveness of the very word “Christian” comes into play here. What does the word mean? Is it a cultural or tribal term — as in Lebanon’s Christians versus Sunni Muslims versus Shiite Muslims versus Druze, without regard to the actual beliefs of the persons therein described? Is it a confessional flag that’s free to be flown by anyone willing to run it up his or her mast? Is it 
tied to membership in a specific denomination or group of denominations? Or is it based upon doctrine, creed, and confession, i.e., orthodoxy in the sense of fidelity to the Bible and the universally-held creeds of Christendom? Because that’s how you measure Obama’s faith, not his simple espousal of the term “Christian.” The actual definition employed says everything about the person making the faith-claim.
Obama’s belief system is clearly heterodox in several important ways. In an important sense he’s significanlty closer to the Universalism of his grandparents than he is to even the nominal orthodoxy that remains in his home denomination, the United Church of Christ (Jeremiah Wright’s denomination). He thus doesn’t meet the standard of orthodox Christianity — which, ironically, puts him in the same boat as his nemesis Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon and also therefore outside the pale of orthodox Christianity.
Obama alludes to this as much when in the Falsani aricle she quotes his response to a crucial text of the Christian faith, John 14:6:
“It’s perhaps an unlikely theological position for someone who places his faith squarely at the feet of Jesus to take, saying essentially that all people of faith — Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone — know the same God.
“That depends, Obama says, on how a particular verse from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me,’ is heard.”
Obama clearly understands the implication of the verse, and eschews orthodoxy in favor of one form of universalism or another, whether in the general sense (all roads lead to the same place, theologically speaking, so a particular faith is merely a function of one’s culture or comfort zone and they’re all essentially interchangeable) or the specific Christian sense, with a capital ‘U’ (in accordance with John 14:6, Jesus effects salvation to everyone through various means). Without speculating too much upon something into which he doesn’t go into detail, my guess is that the discomfort he has with dogma (as outlined elsewhere in the interview) may play into this, as well perhaps as an innate need to embrace as much tolerance and inclusivism in his belief system as he does in his political outlook. Without a more in-depth interview, it’s all speculation. But, clearly, on at least one important level Obama does not fit the definition of a Christian.
On the other hand, he does embrace the evangelical language of the black church. He talks about a salvation experience (and even alludes to coming forward at an altar call), embraces on at least some level the key idea of the faith (Jesus as bridge between God and man, although Obama’s use of the indefinite article — “a bridge” — may be significant), and he uses the evangelical term “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” that distinguishes Christian belief in evangelical circles from mere assent to creedal formulations.
He also has some curious responses to questions about Christian praxis. His understanding of prayer as a sort of dialogue with his inner voice is certainly far from the usual understanding of prayer in any form within the Church, and his response to the question as to the nature of sin — “Being out of alignment with my values” — is decidedly non-orthodox. (In all three streams of Christianity, sin is understood as being out of alignment with God’s values.) He seems uncomfortable with language about the Third Person of the Trinity, while simultaneously expressing that what the black church (as well as the rest of orthodox Christianity) refers to as the work of the Holy Spirit in the preaching of the Word is ultimately its most compelling and congenial aspect for him.
Ultimately, Obama has a complicated expression of belief that clearly falls outside the boundaries of what most observers of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism would view as what C.S. Lewis termed “mere Christianity.” But in that sense, he’s no different than any number of Americans who regularly inhabit pews on Sunday morning — not to mention any number of his predecessors at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What is clear, though, is that there is an active and important belief system at work in Obama’s life, one that this HuffPost article can’t explain away, no matter how hard it tries. To do so is to ultimately challenge Obama’s integrity and to in no uncertain terms call him duplicitous in some very important ways.
