The presidential inauguration ceremony on Tuesday began and ended with prayers from two men whom Barack Obama considers role models, advisers and dear friends.
One, Joseph Lowery, is an 87-year-old Black liberal Methodist from the deep south who spent his career fighting for civil rights. The other, Rick Warren, is a 54-year-old white conservative evangelical from southern California who fights same-sex unions.
The two religious icons are, Lowery said, “usually on opposite sides of the chart.” But Obama stepped onstage with them, set his hand on a Bible and felt comfortable in the vast space in between.
For the new president, religion has always been less about theology than the power God inspires in communities that worship him, friends and advisers said. It has been more than three months since he sat through a Sunday church service and at least five years since he attended regularly, but during the transition, Obama has spoken to religious leaders almost daily. They said Obama calls to seek advice, but rarely is it spiritual. Instead, he asks how to mobilize faith-based communities behind his administration.
Obama grew up the son of an atheist, spent two formative years in a predominantly Muslim school, worked out of an office in a Catholic rectory, accepted Jesus at a traditionally Black church and married the cousin of a Chicago area rabbi. His personal journey to faith is a modern amalgamation that friends expected to be reflected not just at his inauguration but in his governing. Obama will reach out to a diverse set of leaders and try to join them in unconventional ways, unconcerned about their theological and political differences.
He has devoted himself to what he considers God’s truth and thereby internalized the golden rule.
“In terms of religious outreach, it will be as inclusive as anything you’ve ever seen,” said Shaun Casey, who teaches religion and politics at Wesley Theological Seminary in the District and advised Obama during his campaign. “He’s going to involve some different groups, like during the inauguration, that might come as a shock to people.”
Obama has helped facilitate brainstorming groups of rabbis, pastors and politicians. Hours before the polls closed on Election Day, he prayed via telephone with Joel Hunter, an evangelical pastor from Florida who voted for Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary.
“The (president) has a keen appreciation for the power of faith-based organizations that you don’t see in many politicians, so he’s reaching out,” said Hunter, who preaches to a congregation of more than 10,000 each week. “I said something to him once about how evangelicals really need to walk out their faith to other people. And he said, ‘Boy, that’s where I am, too.’”
Said Martin Marty, a religious historian from Chicago: “What he’s trying to do, rather daringly, is enact the plurality that he embodies. This is not unusual for a new president. There’s a tendency to want to please everybody, but by doing that you run the risk of pleasing nobody.”
Obama was born to parents who distrusted organized religion: a father who transitioned from Muslim to atheist as he became increasingly disillusioned with his place in the world; a mother who found solace in spirituality and good deeds but never showed interest in her family’s Christian roots. Obama has said he accompanied his mother to church occasionally on holidays as a child but rarely contemplated religion until he left Hawaii for college.
As an undergraduate student at Columbia University, Obama read some basic theological texts and felt drawn to Sunday morning services at predominantly Black churches in Harlem. When he interviewed in 1985 for a community-organizing position on the south side of Chicago that required working with churches, it was religion that persuaded him to take the job.
“That was the one aspect that he was really drawn to and wanted to be a part of,” said Jerry Kellman, who hired Obama for a salary of less than $10,000.
Obama took the job and moved into an office at Holy Rosary, a small Catholic church in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood where he mingled with a diverse congregation that included equal parts whites, Blacks and second-generation Mexican immigrants. He spent 10-hour days at the church, absorbing its motto: “living in faith together.”
Just as he had used religion to galvanize residents of the south side as a community organizer, Obama used it to identify with constituents as a politician. When he was starting his career in the state Senate in the late 1990s, Obama joined a 33-person brainstorming group called the Saguaro Seminar, a collection of activists, academics and politicians who gathered every few months and ruminated on politics and religion.
Through the Saguaro Seminar, Obama befriended the president of the Christian Coalition Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Dallas area Methodist minister who became President Bush’s closest spiritual adviser. Obama grew particularly close to Jim Wallis, an evangelical political activist from Washington who founded Sojourners magazine.
“We hit it off,” Wallis said. “We had very similar ideas about how faith could contribute to public life. He wanted that to be a major part of his career going forward.”
If at first it seemed unusual for a liberal Democrat to spend so much time talking about God, Obama’s closest followers gradually came to expect it. He delivered a speech at Warren’s Saddleback Church in 2006 despite protests from fellow Democrats. He wrote a chapter about faith for “The Audacity of Hope” and met with groups of 30 to 40 religious leaders more than a dozen times during his presidential campaign.
“Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square,” Obama said during a speech at the Call to Renewal conference in 2006. “Indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue their cause.”
“He instinctively realizes that it’s an important thing to do,” said Caldwell, the Bush adviser who supported and advised Obama during the campaign. “I’m not saying he’s somebody who will go every Sunday and stand up to talk about his personal faith. That’s not him. But I do believe he understands that being a part of that faith community is something that’s extremely important going forward.”
