The Faith of Barack Obama

By Stephen Mansfield

“You must read this perceptive and well written book. Then you will know why Barack Obama has such a passion for justice and equity.” —Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Barack Obama. The speculation about his religious life abounds. Is he a closet Muslim? Is he really a Christian? Did his faith have anything to do with his governing? As the picture of President Obama’s faith has emerged, questions about the foundation of his beliefs continue to ignite debate. In this updated edition of his international bestseller The Faith of Barack Obama, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Mansfield explores the claims of Obama’s detractors and supporters alike, while examining how the challenges of the presidency shaped Obama’s religious beliefs.

This evenhanded account of the former president’s spiritual life provides a closer look at the people and events that have influenced his belief system. Mansfield analyzes Obama’s friendship with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and also profiles the Christian leaders who offered guidance and support during the president’s challenging term.

Mansfield takes you inside the religious life of Barack Obama, introducing you to the type of preaching the president heard at Camp David and even revealing details such as the content of the daily devotional readings the former president received on his cell phone. This fascinating study explains the faith elements within Obama’s politics, while acknowledging the questions about his beliefs that remain unanswered.

“Mansfield presents an analysis of Obama’s distinctly postmodern journey that will generate valuable discussion across the religious spectrum.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781595554642

Stephen Mansfield

Stephen Mansfield is the New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln's Battle with God, The Faith of Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, Searching for God and Guinness, and Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife, Beverly.

Book preview

The

FAITH

of Barack Obama

REVISED AND UPDATED

ALSO BY STEPHEN MANSFIELD

Never Give In:

The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill

Then Darkness Fled:

The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington

Forgotten Founding Father:

The Heroic Legacy of George Whitefield

The Faith of George W. Bush

The Faith of the American Soldier

Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission

The Search for God and Guinness

The

FAITH

of Barack Obama

REVISED AND UPDATED

STEPHEN MANSFIELD

9781595554635_INT_0003_001

© 2008, 2011 by Stephen Mansfield

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ ThomasNelson.com.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from KING JAMES VERSION.

Interior photos provided by AP Images.

Page design: Walter Petrie

ISBN: 978-1-59555-463-5 (trade paper)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Mansfield, Stephen, 1958-

     The faith of Barack Obama / written by Stephen Mansfield.

         p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 978-1-59555-250-1 (hardcover)

    1. Obama, Barack—Religion. 2. Presidential candidates—United States—

    Biography. 3. Legislators—United States—Biography. 4. Religion and

    politics—United States—Case studies. I. Title.

    E901.1.O23M36 2008

     328.73092—dc22

    [B]

2008023371

Printed in the United States of America

11 12 13 14 15 QGF 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Beverly, song of my life

Contents

The Life of Barack Obama: A Chronology

Introduction

1. To Walk Between Worlds

2. My House, Too

3. Faith Fit for the Age

4. The Altars of State

5. A New Band of Brothers

6. A Time to Heal

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

The Life of Barack Obama: A Chronology

ix

x

Introduction

xi

IT WAS AUGUST 18, 2010, AND THE LEAD STORY OF THE news cycle that day was not what the Obama White House wanted to hear. A new national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed that a huge number of Americans were, at best, confused about President Obama’s religious life and were, at worst, convinced he was lying about what he believed. Fully 43 percent of Americans said they had no idea what Obama’s religion was. One third of all adults, some 34 percent, were convinced that Obama was indeed a Christian, as he claimed, but this was down sharply from 48 percent just a year before. And most disturbing of all, 18 percent said they were convinced that the president was a Muslim, which was not only up from 11 percent in March 2009, but represented nearly one-fifth of all Americans.¹

Obama’s senior advisors were stunned. How could this be? Surely Barack Obama had exposed his private faith to the public glare as much as any president in recent history. There had been not one but two best-selling books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, in which Obama had described his spiritual journey in heart-wrenching detail. Then there was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy during the 2008 campaign that had led in turn to the A More Perfect Union speech, a high-water mark both for Obama’s standing in the polls and for religious transparency by an American presidential candidate. There had also been the Presidential Faith Forum in which candidate Obama told Pastor Rick Warren of Southern California’s Saddleback Church that he looked to Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of his sins. As if that wasn’t enough, Obama had asked Warren to pray at his Inauguration, along with the ranking Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

xii

Clearly, these public affirmations of faith, if the Pew Forum was to be believed, had made little impression on the public mind. What frustrated Team Obama even more, though, were the convincing displays of faith that went unreported, which a religiously unmoved media largely kept from public view. Why wasn’t it widely known, for example, that each year since taking office Obama had given an Easter speech on his view of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that was so personal and passionate that it often left attendees in tears? Why didn’t the press report that some of the most famous Christian leaders of the age helped encourage the president’s faith. And to the charge that Obama was still a Muslim, hadn’t he said to the entire Islamic world—in his famous Cairo speech in June 2009—I am a Christian. What more did this man need to do to declare his religion?

xiii

Still, the numbers did not lie. As one White House official said with exasperation, Here we were slightly more than a year and a half into his presidency, just prior to the mid-term elections, and we find that nearly half of all Americans have no idea what Obama believes religiously. And a fifth think he’s lying about being a Christian! We had failed and we knew it. We also knew the rules of the new game. A politician’s faith is in play, part of the package, part of what gives him appeal. And because we knew this we knew we were in trouble.² And so they were. Less than three months later, Obama and his fellow Democrats received their famous shellacking in the mid-term elections, losing both prestige and control of Congress in one of the worst electoral defeats in American history. Polls revealed that religion had played a role—in the makeup of the influential Tea Party, in the reason voters chose from the conservative side of the political spectrum, and in the suspicion and distrust with which many Americans viewed the Obama administration.

Here we were slightly more than a year and a half into his presidency, just prior to the midterm elections, and we find that nearly half of all Americans have no idea what Obama believes religiously. And a fifth think he’s lying about being a Christian!

xiv

Equally troubling, Obama’s senior staff and team of spiritual advisors knew they were dealing with something even more difficult to address than the Democratic Party’s flagging political fortunes. They were dealing with a feeling, an amorphous sentiment, that Barack Obama was somehow other, that he was foreign, that he was far removed from the American religious mainstream. Some of this, of course, was a product of Obama’s exotic background and his race, but it was also due to a deep-seated sense on the part of some Americans that the president simply was not who he said he was. This was as unfair, perhaps, as it was frustrating, but it was an obstacle of perception Obama’s advisors knew they had to surmount.

For the already suspicious, evidence of the president’s religious infidelity seemed readily at hand. After entering the White House, Obama and his family had chosen not to attend a Washington DC–area church since the chaos that ensued when they did made worship impossible. Instead, they attended services whenever they could at Evergreen Chapel, the small, nondescript sanctuary at Camp David, the president’s private retreat. But this meant there were no pictures of the president exiting a church each Sunday while shaking the hand of a robed clergyman and waving—Bible in hand—to the press. Many Americans assumed the president simply stayed home on their Sabbath Day. Then there were the Jewish Seders and the Hindu Diwali services and the Muslim Ramadan dinners that the Obama White House held. Many of these had been hosted even by the evangelical George W. Bush, but somehow a deeper suspicion attached itself to Obama when he invited non-Christian religions into the President’s House. Nor were Obama’s political opponents any help when they made the kind of statements Mike Huckabee had offered to an American Family Radio interviewer in March 2011: I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he [Obama] has a different world view, and I think it’s in part molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings, and you know, our communities were filled with rotary clubs, not madrassas.³ Of course, there was no evidence that Barack Obama had ever darkened the door of a madrassa—an often radical school for Muslim youth—but it didn’t seem to matter. Obama was of dark skin, from a darker family background and may well have been from the dark side spiritually. Any slur could be made to stick.

Obama was of dark skin, from a darker family background and may well have been from the dark side spiritually. Any slur could be made to stick.

xv

As convincing to those who distrusted Obama religiously were the president’s actions in office. He seemed to never have heard of an abortion he did not support. He refused to take a stand for the Defense of Marriage Act. He supported the Palestinian cause—urging a return to 1967, pre–Six Day War borders for the impending Palestinian state—rather than championing Israeli territorial integrity as other presidents had done. In short, Obama never seemed to grow his policies organically from the soil of faith, as Reagan or Bush or even Carter had attempted to do.

xvi

Obama advisors could scoff at such accusations but what they knew with certainty was that things had changed. They had lost ground in this matter of the president’s religion and it was hurting them. They could blame the press secretary and his staff but they knew that the public relations apparatus of a presidential administration rarely handles the first family’s religion well. The president’s people are often clumsy in talking about the subject and the press is often clumsy in reporting it. It is seldom a winning game.

Still, they would have to reclaim the religious high ground. Nearly every one of their Republican opponents were people for whom religious faith was a frontline issue and each would be eager to flush Obama out. No, the questions about what the president believed and why he believed it were not going away. Indeed, they were going to intensify and perhaps serve to frame perceptions that would in time define the Obama presidency, both in the race for a second term and, perhaps, on the pages of history.

FACED WITH THESE MOUNTING RELIGIOUS CHALLENGES, IT was pleasant for some senior White House staffers—particularly those who had been with the president for many years—to think back to the early days, when an exciting young Barack Obama had announced himself and his religious intentions to an adoring nation. It had first occurred on a cool, overcast Tuesday in July 2004. On the afternoon of that day, Barack Obama had been making the expected round of meetings before his speech that evening at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He had come at the request of John Kerry, who upon meeting Obama knew that the young man might very well be the face of the Democratic Party’s future. Kerry wanted Obama’s story and thoughtful oratory to feature in the convention’s symbolic pageant just then unfolding before the watching world.

xvii

That afternoon, Obama walked the Boston streets with his friend, Chicago businessman Martin Nesbitt. At each stop, eager crowds formed and pressed ever closer to the thin black state senator from Illinois.

This is incredible! Nesbitt gushed. You’re like a rock star!

Turning to his friend, Obama replied, If you think it’s bad today, wait till tomorrow.

Nesbitt looked puzzled. What do you mean?

My speech is pretty good, Obama explained. Clearly, he already had some sense of his destiny.⁴

That evening, after being introduced by Illinois senator Dick