A few months back, I dedicated some time to examining some of the on-the-record statements that Barack Obama has made about his spirituality.
At that time, I linked to Cathleen Falsani’s interview with Obama from four years ago, along with some other primary texts. Now, Falsani is reacting to this article by Cal Thomas, who is skeptical of Obama’s Christian faith. Thomas concludes, after much parsing of both Obama’s words and the additional insight offered by Falsani, that:
Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement. One cannot deny central tenets of the Christian faith, including the deity and uniqueness of Christ as the sole mediator between God and Man and be a Christian. Such people do have a label applied to them in Scripture. They are called “false prophets.”
Falsani responds:
Obama says he believes, abides and is trying to follow Jesus.
He’s a humble believer and doesn’t want to give the impression that he has the corner on truth. I respect that, although it makes fielding questions about his faith more complicated and provocative.
It is dangerous to try to judge the quality of a man’s faith. That is God’s purview, not ours.
This back-and-forth raises a couple of important questions. First, is Barack Obama a Christian? And perhaps we ought to ask two qualifying questions to that question. How can we know if he’s a Christian? And, I think more importantly, does it matter?
To the question of whether or not Obama is a Christian, I’m skeptical that the adequate forensic tools exist to answer this question. I think this is a question that is getting more difficult to answer in the age we live, partly because evangelical Christians have so narrowly defined what it means to be a “Christian”. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has a fairly airtight claim to being “Christian”. But there are plenty of evangelicals who openly question the theological genuineness of that claim. In fact, the test for orthodoxy seems to be getting tougher and tougher to pass. There are many who spend large amounts of time and resources drawing lines between who’s “in” and who’s “out”.
With all that said, the only way we can truly judge the condition of Obama’s soul and the veracity of his claim to be a follower of Jesus, in the historic, theological sense, would be to spend time parsing his owns words and actions. At that point, the whole matter becomes very subjective. Thomas, Falsani, and others have spent some time trying to deconstruct the words of Obama to determine what he really means when he claims to be a Christian. A person’s starting point will dictate where they arrive, on something like this.
Can Barack Obama confess the Nicene Creed? Probably so. Does he call himself “born again”? Probably not. Does he believe Jesus is God? From what I can tell, it appears so. Does he believe that some people will go to heaven and others will go to hell? That seems less clear.
And this brings me to my second question — does it matter if Barack Obama is a Christian?
Quite frankly, I don’t think it does. If the last 20 years of politics should teach us anything, it’s that the relationship between faith and politics can often become very dysfunctional. Should a candidate’s faith matter? I suppose that it should, in the sense that religious faith of any variety ought to guide and direct a person in his or her decision-making. The great religions of the world all have strong ethical traditions that, when when practiced, should make their adherents better people and, consequently, better leaders.
But does it really matter if Obama follows Jesus, Mohammed, Buddah, or no God or prophet all? And when I ask, “does it matter,” I mean in the sense that it would make him any better or worse of a president if he professed faith in one or the other.
After all, Bill Clinton professed a Christian faith, and he not only maintained an inappropriate relationship with an intern for a long period of time, but he also did everything he could to cover up that relationship and withhold that information from investigators and the public. You could also point out that George W. Bush professes a Christian faith, but he’s made numerous decisions that could be described as somehow contrary to the teachings of Jesus, again, depending on how you want to understand the entirety of Christian thought.
It’s become pretty troubling in recent years to see how Republicans and now Democrats are increasingly using faith as a tool to acquire power by exploiting the power of people’s faith to gain votes. Shouldn’t this election be more about policy than piety? Shouldn’t we be electing the person we think is best suited to make hard decisions in times of uncertainty? And shouldn’t we be doing this irrespective of the personal religious faith of an individual candidate?
I’m curious what you think.
