Obama and the Challenge for People of Faith
I first heard then-State Sen. Barack Obama speak during his 2004 campaign in my home of Kankakee County, Illinois. Before the Democratic Keynote Address, I shook the hand of the “skinny kid with a funny name,” and he hooked me for life with his stump of “a campaign and politics that recognizes a common decency of every human being.” I listened and thought that Obama’s words could have been taken from a pamphlet on Catholic Social Teaching, but this universal message attracted both secular and religious individuals.
For the past several years, religious conservatives have given members of the progressive community plenty of reason to distrust people of faith in pursuit of justice and the common good. This morning, U.S. Sen. Obama, the Golden Boy of the Left, offered an account of his own political convictions grounded in faith and identified the challenge for faithful people whose faith compels them to seek social, economic, and racial justice.
On the final morning of Sojourners’ “Pentecost 2006″ Conference, Sen. Obama took to the podium this morning at National City Christian Church in Downtown Washington, DC. After being awarded the Joseph Award for his commitment to combat poverty as a community organizer and elected official, Obama delivered a thoughtful address on faith in the public sphere.
Obama described the contemporary polity in which a Religious Right has claimed a sole ownership of moral values and a Secular Left often relegates faith to absurdity. He affirmed the importance of a barrier between church and state, as a protection for both. According to Obama, people of faith can and have invoked monumental social and political change, but they do carry an extra duty. He explained, “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.”
Obama demonstrates that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive, rather that their rightful integration can be a powerful force to do good.