Obama's views on religion and politics [View All]

[amborin]

sorry, but they're too far to the radical right for me....how does Obama differ from the radical christian right here?



(c) 2006 University of Dayton Law Review
University of Dayton Law Review

Fall, 2006

32 Dayton L. Rev. 29

ESSAY: RELIGION AND POLITICS: THE CATHOLIC CONTRIBUTION

NAME: James L. Heft, S.M.*

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....Let me start with Obama. No politician, in my opinion, has addressed the issue of religion and politics at the length and with the substance as did Barack Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois who electrified much of the nation in his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention.

On June 28, 2006, he gave the keynote address to the Call to Renewal organization, a mainly Democratic, faith-based movement to overcome poverty. n28 Catholic political columnist E.J. Dionne called it the most significant statement on Church-state relations since John Kennedy's address in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of over three hundred Evangelical ministers. n29 But with Obama we have a very different situation - one that is nearly the opposite of the one Kennedy faced.

Instead of assuring ministers, as Kennedy did, that his faith as a Catholic would not affect his decisions as President, Obama the Senator chastised his fellow Democrats for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith . . . in the lives of the American people." n30 He sets out to face squarely the "mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America." n31 He states that it is time that we "join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy." n32 He warns against scrubbing language "of all religious content," since to do so is to "forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of <*37> Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice."

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Obama declares:


hat I am suggesting is this-secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas , Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant , Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King-indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history-were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.< n34 > So to 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...