Mirror of Justice

Barack Obama's widely-noticed speech last week on religion and politics was a pretty good one, I think.  Pretty good, I'd claim, even apart from what any of us think about the substance of his policies vs. Republican or conservative policies.

It's no great novelty now for liberals to be touting the importance of religion.  But here are a few ways in which, I think, Obama's address is an advance over previous efforts, at least most any by politicians.  First, he explicitly recognizes the inadequacy of saying "I can't impose my beliefs on others."  He recounts that when in the 2004 campaign he was accused of not being a true Christian,

I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.

But Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.

He recognizes the long history of religious involvement in politics, and adds: "[T]o say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.  Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."  It's nice to hear that point put so straightforwardly by a Senator on the left.

Second, he avoids the liberal politicians' tendency of treating faith as simply a source of motivation for political action (which, in the hands of say John Kerry, looked like a religious veneer slapped on top of a bunch of preexisting political positions).  Obama talks about faith as a motivation for social and political action, but he also talks about faith independently as the basis for one's whole person.  He discusses this in his own life:

It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.

I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.

And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.

And if it weren't for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.

He also discusses it in terms of the existential answers that faith provides to Americans overall:

[Americans'] religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.

As a corollary to this, he explicitly emphasizes that attacking social problems requires personal transformation of individuals (the disadvantaged and the powerful) as well as the commitment of social resources:

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers' lobby - but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we've got a moral problem. There's a hole in that young man's heart - a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

The essential role of personal transformation in solving poverty and related problems is probably the biggest affirmative element in a conservative approach to those issues, and Obama affirms it -- at the same time as he emphasizes the need for government action.

Finally, at the end of the speech Obama tells an interesting story in which an Illinois voter called him out in 2004 for some unfair and intemperate anti-pro-life language that was then on his website, and Obama admitted this and changed the language.  The speech thus finishes with an exhortation for fair-mindedness and charity toward one's political opponents, a theme sounded throughout the text.  Both liberal and conservative religious-political activists could use that advice.

There are things to criticize in the speech (even setting aside, as I said, criticism of his substantive political positions).  Obama says:

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. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This statement goes too far.  Although we can likely all agree that it is generally best for people in a pluralistic democracy to translate their religious arguments into widely accessible concepts, I doubt that "[d]emocracy demands [it]" in each and every case.  If it did, a lot of the religious movements and figures Obama cites earlier would have violated the democratic ground rules.  In addition, abortion seems a wildly inappropriate example for the point:  there are plenty of widely accessible, non-sectarian arguments for prohibiting abortion, and you'd think he would acknowledge that (apart from whether the arguments are convincing).  Indeed, although he says something briefly about reducing abortions, there's a noticeable absence of any attempt to defend the pro-choice position once he's jettisoned (as he claims) the stock phrase about "not imposing beliefs on others."

More fundamentally, I hope that Obama's hospitable attitude toward religion in politics displayed in this speech -- including toward those on the other side politically -- would carry over into other contexts as well.  I hope he'd call for respect for pro-life religious views not only at a meeting of religious progressives, but at a meeting of NARAL or at the 2008 Democratic convention.  But overall, I thought there were a number of good things in the speech.

Tom