Obama and Religion

I'm an atheist. Obama is very religious, perhaps the most religious of all the first-tier presidential candidates, perhaps the most religious since Jimmy Carter. Yet I continue to support him. Last night, blog-neighbor and longtime (in blog-years) correspondent Mark at Pseudo-Polymath asked how I could support Obama, given quotes like the following:

Sometimes this is a difficult road being in politics. Sometimes you can become fearful, sometimes you can become vain, sometimes you can seek power just for power’s sake instead of because you want to do service to God. I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God . . . We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.

The remarks were made at the Redemption World Outreach Center in South Carolina, an evangelical church.

Mark insinuates that I would have sharply criticized Bush for making similar statements and I think that's true. So how can I continue to support Obama? The short answer is that religion isn't everything. For the longer answer, keep reading.

I think there are two distinct but important prongs to the question of how Obama's religion affects his potential presidency. First, how does his religion inform his character? Second, how would it directly affect his policy choices if he were elected?

How does Obama's religion inform his character?

Religion can be a positive or negative influence on one's character. On the one hand, it can lead to humility, compassion, and selflessness, but on the other, it can lead to intellectual dishonesty, intolerance, and inflexibility.

Obama does not seem to suffer from the kind of intellectual dishonesty that plagues many religious people; nor is he afraid of doubt. Here's an enlightening exchange from an interview he did with Andrew Sullivan:

AS: This is I think one of the more (to me at least), the most interesting part of your candidacy. Because we live in a world in which atheism - militant, contemptuous atheism - is on the rise. Religious fundamentalism is clearly the strongest force. Your faith - this thought-through intellectual faith, in many ways, but also a communal faith – is beleaguered, isn’t it?

BO: You know, it doesn't get a lot of play these days. But, you know, reading Niebuhr, or Tillich or folks like that—those are the people that sustain me. What I believe in is overcoming - but not eliminating - doubt and questioning. I don't believe in an easy path to salvation. For myself or for the world. I think that it’s hard work, being moral. It's hard work being ethical. And I think that it requires a series of judgments and choices that we make every single day. And part of what I want to do as president is open up a conversation in which we are honestly considering our obligations - towards each other. And obligations towards the world.

Hard to imagine Bush reading Niebuhr or Tillich.

Although it's inconceivable to me that a presidential candidate would be extremely humble, Obama's faith does not seem to have given him the same lack of humility that I've mocked Bush for.

Here is Obama on gay marriage, for example, which I posted about here:

It is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claim infallibility in my support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infected with society's prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus' call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I might be seen on the wrong side of history.

"I must admit that I may have been infected with society's prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God." Wow. Could you imagine George Bush doing that kind of introspection? "... that Jesus' call to love one another might demand a different conclusion." Wouldn't our country be better off if that sentiment were more common?

Obama appears to see faith as something that compels him towards compassion and social justice. From the CNN story above:

Obama said he was pleased that leaders in the evangelical community such as T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren were beginning to discuss social justice issues like AIDS and poverty in ways evangelicals were not doing before.

It's true that George Bush ran on a platform of "compassionate conservatism," but compassion and social justice do not appear to have played much role in his presidency, to say the least. Obama, like many or most liberal religious thinkers, appears to see social justice as a preeminent focus of religion. (Indeed "social justice" might be said to be the core value of Reform Judaism, something which is mocked by many Orthodox Jews.)

In the past few decades, politicians have invoked religion almost exclusively as a way of denying other peoples' rights (gay rights, abortion rights) or as part of the rhetoric of war (evildoers, etc.) I think that Obama sees himself as having the potential of undoing that disservice to both religion and our country:

"I think that what you're seeing is a breaking down of the sharp divisions that existed maybe during the '90s," said Obama. "At least in politics, the perception was that the Democrats were fearful of talking about faith, and on the other hand you had the Republicans who had a particular brand of faith that oftentimes seemed intolerant or pushed people away..."

"I think that's a healthy thing, that we're not putting people in boxes, that everybody is out there trying to figure out how do we live right and how do we create a stronger America," Obama said.

As I see it, Obama's faith has given him (or, more precisely, Obama has identified faith for giving him) a strong drive for social justice without the arrogance that the faithful sometimes have. He also indicates that he would stop the use of religion as a wedge issue in America and I think there's reason to believe that an Obama presidency could end much of the divisiveness in America and strip the religious right of some of its power.

How would Obama's religion directly affect his policy choices if he were elected?

I've already addressed the role Obama could play in re-balancing religion's influence on controversial issues like gay rights, abortion, and social justice. What about the separation of church and state? Well, here's the big man himself:

For my friends on the right, I think it would be helpful to remember the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy but also our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn't the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn't want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves.

It was the forbearers of Evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they didn't want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it. Given this fact, I think that the right might worry a bit more about the dangers of sectarianism.

Whatever we once were, we're no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers. We should acknowledge this and realize that when we're formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we've got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community.

In summary, I believe Obama to be the best kind of religious person: authentic, humble in his beliefs, compassionate, and driven towards social justice. He and I differ on the question of God's existence, but I believe that we share the same values. I post about atheism a lot because it's an important issue in my own life, having grown up in a community I had to leave, but I don't see being an atheist as more important than being a good person and I certainly don't think that people should vote for a candidate solely because he or she is more or less religious than another one.

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries

This is ridiculous:

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

...

The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.

The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.

...

“Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of them donated,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the shelves.”

Shockingly (not) there appear to be certain biases:

In some cases, the lists indicate their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house...

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

Because if there's one group of religious people who encourage violence, it's liberal theologians.

What were they thinking? How could it possibly be a good idea -- or remotely Constitutional -- for the government to decide which religious books are okay and which aren't? Anyway, if we're going to start removing religious books from prisons for condoning violence, wouldn't the Old Testament and the Quran have to be at the front of the line? Obviously, they can't remove those, so what's the point?

Hat tip to Marina Grace.