A Deeper, Fuller Conversation About Religion In This Country

This addresses the need to renew Senator Obama's call for A Deeper, Fuller Conversation About Religion In This Country.

Over the course of just a few hours, the vibrant and ongoing conversation about faith during the 2008 election has been obfuscated by a few comments,which so many opportunists are now peddling as “religious controversy.”  We may not even be sure what to make of these cherry-picked sound bites taken from a single speech given on June 28, 2006. Pulled out of the context of the speech (and the candidate’s broader ideas about the importance of his faith), it is easy to exploit a few words to garner attention and cause a clamor.  That’s the easy way to approach all of this.

But arguing over petty he-said-he-said matters is not going to do a single thing to serve those who are suffering during an ever-worsening economic downturn.  Neither will trifling over a few select words help us discern anything worthwhile about the heart and mind of this man who seeks the Presidency.  One thing is certain: such a course of action will do much less for us than we could learn by holistically considering the choices he has made and the life he has lived.  Yet instant media is not engineered to provide such nuance and subtlety.  And human beings were not wonderfully made to be reduced to these few phrases or sound bites played ad infinitum.  So here we find ourselves, yet again, at our erstwhile impasse in which a worthwhile and meaningful discussion becomes replaced with fervor and vitriol and then repeated, repeated, repeated.

Before getting too mired in a Reverend Wright redux, though, let’s not forget that even in the midst of the sensationalization and stigmatization that the twenty-four hour news cycle can giveth or taketh away, Obama’s words should be quite familiar to our ears.   This isn’t to be flippant, but were these words really worth the attention we are giving them?  I mean, even the West Wing riffed on this once upon a time with very similar turns of phrases:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHaVUjjH3EI&feature=related

Audio:  http://www.mediaresearch.org/audiobias/vidclips/2006/profiles/2000-10-18-NBCWW.mp3

But back to the main point. Regardless of your thoughts about Senator Obama’s theology, or even his candidacy, it is dishonest to the discourse to focus on a few words while failing to acknowledge the larger context of what else he stated during the course of the speech from June 28, 2006. Here’s just a short excerpt:

Pastors,friends of mine like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like our good friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality.

And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you've got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don't need and weren't even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.

Across the country, individual churches like my own and your own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

So the question is, how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will? It's going to take more work, a lot more work than we've done so far. The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed. And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.

Areas impacted by Katrina remain in grave need of an immense rebuilding and rejuvenation effort, as well as the financial, political, and prayerful support of the leaders and people of this nation.  Our amnesia about Katrina is exemplary of how our attention has shifted to pettier purposes, but there are so many American problems requiring a truly American response that we simply have not given for whatever reason.  There are too many suffering people within our nation’s boundaries to whom we are all inextricably bound, each and every one of us, as citizens of this great country.  It is an appalling disservice to the least fortunate among us – and a horrible underestimation of our collective capacity to achieve the common good – if we do not right these wrongs where we can as a nation.  When we instead stand idly by, watching this election shift away from the important issues and deteriorate into this kind of accusatory, destructive rhetoric, then we have failed in our democratic responsibility.

So today, we watched as images flashed across our television and computer screens showing anger and desperation, disagreement and divisiveness, and blame, blame, blame.  Tomorrow, we can each personally respond by reaching out to others more compassionately in our own individual ways. 

Today, we listened to the media-driven drivel about a few supposedly radical comments that Obama once made.  Tomorrow, we can begin listening and sharing in what Barack Obama once proposed when he called for“a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country.”  We might start by checking with the source of that phrase, in perhaps the unlikeliest of places, a speech given on June 28, 2006. 

http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060628-call_to_renewal/