Barack Obama & My Fork

Most days, it's hard to be a progressive who is trying to follow Jesus in the United States.  Being a part of conversation about the reality of being a Christian and a progressive, I often feel like the un-said agreement is that you can either be passionate about one or the other, but not both.  There seems like there is defined fork in the road, that allegiance to Jesus is some oldtime folklore and that support of progressive causes is a definition of a modern worldview.  There are times where I sense that it would much easier to be a Wiccan progressive or a Republican Christianist, but the fork is so narrowly drawn that being a Christian progressive is just too much of an anomoly.

Reports like this one from Patrick Hynes here only serve to let me know that I am not alone in this reality:

According to cross-tabulated data I have received from Bloomberg, 37% of self-identified liberals say they would vote against an evangelical Christian candidate for president; 38% of self-identified liberal Democrats would do so. Democrats as a whole are significantly more likely to vote against an evangelical Christian candidate for president–over a quarter (28%)–than either Republican or Independent voters. And barely a majority (53%) of all Democrats would vote for an evangelical candidate for president.

This new information could not come at a worse time for Democrat politicians. Since their 2004 electoral drubbing, some Democrats have initiated a campaign to win the hearts and minds of America’s faithful. Perhaps they should start by opening the hearts and minds of their own political supporters.

One of things that being Christian and a progressive have in common is hope - the desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain.  I have found a great deal of hope in the words of a Senator who I hope will one day be the first President of color.

A few weeks back at Call to Renewal's annual conference, Sen. Barack Obama gave much-talked-about and just-as-much-misunderstood speech about religion and politics last week (you can listen to it here).

Amy Sullivan, one of the smartest writers on the faith & politics beat, writes about it at Slate:

Obama's speech, delivered to an audience of the frustrated religious left, was not a tactical plan for electoral success in November or in 2008. It wasn't a "We are too religious!" rebuttal to Republicans. It was, for the first time in modern memory, an affirmative statement from a Democrat about "how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy," as Obama put it. John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Mario Cuomo in 1984 each gave seminal speeches on faith and Democratic politics, but they were primarily concerned with defining their own faith—Catholicism—in terms of what it was not.

Obama's goal was different and larger. The speech worked partly because the senator speaks with easy-going confidence about his faith, weaving spiritual phrases into his speech without needing to announce them to his audience as so many of his colleagues do ("This debate about tax cuts reminds me of that verse from the Book of Hebrews …"). But more important, he doesn't recount the story of his conversion in order to establish his religious bona fides; he does it in the service of a broader argument. And he doesn't defend progressives' claim to religion; he asserts the responsibilities that fall to them as religious people. Americans are looking, Obama said, for a "deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country." He started that conversation. A few others are joining in. It's time for everyone else to catch up. (my emphasis)

Comments

[steve hollinghurst]

Bob

whilst there are some things 'specifically US' about this issuse it has it/s equivalensts elsewhere. in the UK we don't have the same political tie up between evangleicals and righgt wing politics, but it is assumed you are either missional, and thus proabaly evangleical or you are progressive and thus liberal. i think many are feeling this is a dichotomy that makes no sense after modernity, but people keep wanting to put you back in the old boxes and to have a progressive view on one thing is to get peopel assuming a whole package. keep plugging away for the both and!