<\/strong><\/p>\nWhile on the presidential campaign trail 30 years ago, someone asked Jimmy Carter a rather indelicate public question:<\/p>\n
Are you born again?<\/p>\n
Carter said he was. And the next thing he knew, various media creatures were accusing the Southern Baptist peanut farmer of implying that his political aspirations had a divine imprimatur.<\/p>\n
\u201cI truthfully answered, \u2018Yes,\u2019 assuming all devout Christians were born again, of the Holy Spirit,\u201d Carter wrote in his 2005 book,\u00a0Our Endangered Values: America\u2019s Moral Crisis.<\/em><\/p>\nIn 1976, most reporters didn\u2019t know born-again from over-easy. But times have changed and so has the public conversation about politics and religion. Terms such as \u201cfundamentalist,\u201d \u201cevangelical\u201d and \u201cborn-again\u201d are part of the media vernacular.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean, however, that such terms are particularly helpful by themselves in describing, much less defining, anyone \u2014 be they politicians, presidential candidates or private citizens.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that\u2019s why, back when I interviewed Barack Obama about his faith in spring 2004 a few days after he\u2019d won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, I didn\u2019t ask him something I\u2019ve remained curious about since:<\/p>\n
Does he consider himself an evangelical?<\/p>\n
Nearly three years ago, before his famous keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, before he spoke to the spiritual \u201cprogressives\u201d at Call for Renewal or to Rick Warren\u2019s congregation at Saddleback, before he became a household name outside of Illinois, when people who knew him still were whispering about whether \u2014 some day \u2014 the young state senator from Chicago might run for president, Obama sat with me in public at a cafe on South Michigan Avenue and talked about his faith.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t hesitate. No one coached him. He didn\u2019t choose his words carefully or tailor his responses. He shot from the hip, giving me candid and complicated answers to my inquiries about his religious history, beliefs and doubts.<\/p>\n
At the time, Obama said he was a Christian, that he has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, that he reads the Bible regularly and prays constantly. He described his conversion experience in his mid-20s, how he walked the aisle at Trinity United Church of Christ one Sunday in a public affirmation of his private change of heart. But we didn\u2019t talk labels, I didn\u2019t ask him for one, and he didn\u2019t offer.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, during a visit to the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board, I had a chance to ask Obama that lingering question:<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you an evangelical?\u201d<\/p>\n
Surrounded by members of the editorial board, editors, our publisher, and a couple of his own aides, this was Obama\u2019s answer:<\/p>\n
\u201cGosh, I\u2019m not sure if labels are helpful here because the definition of an evangelical is so loose and subject to so many different interpretations. I came to Christianity through the black church tradition where the line between evangelical and non-evangelical is completely blurred. Nobody knows exactly what it means.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes it mean that you feel you\u2019ve got a personal relationship with Christ the savior? Then that\u2019s directly part of the black church experience. Does it mean you\u2019re born-again in a classic sense, with all the accoutrements that go along with that, as it\u2019s understood by some other tradition? I\u2019m not sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
He continued his answer: \u201cMy faith is complicated by the fact that I didn\u2019t grow up in a particular religious tradition. And so what that means is when you come at it as an adult, your brain mediates a lot, and you ask a lot of questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are aspects of Christian tradition that I\u2019m comfortable with and aspects that I\u2019m not. There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to me and others that I go, \u2018Ya know, I\u2019m not sure about that,'\u201d he said, shrugging and stammering slightly.<\/p>\n
It would have been easier for the senator-cum-president to answer, simply, \u201cYes,\u201d to the evangelical question.<\/p>\n
But for Obama, as for many of us, faith is complicated, messy, a work in progress.<\/p>\n
And, if we\u2019re honest about it, the standard labels just don\u2019t fit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Later today I\u2019ll be appearing on CNN to talk about President Obama\u2019s faith, based in large part on the lengthy interview he gave me in April 2004 about his spiritual life. That interview also appeared in my first book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (2006). The request from CNN comes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-godstuff-2"],"yoast_head":"\n
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