Stephen Mansfield believes that President Obama’s diverse spiritual journey puts him in step with the rest of the country:
Nearly any religious survey of the American people of late reveals the undeniable trends. More than 90% of Americans believe in God or a universal power, and loosely 84% associate themselves with an organized faith. Yet the vast majority also believe that there might be many versions of the faith they embrace and that their faith might not be the only path to God. Indeed, Americans are less likely to believe that any single faith is the only path to God, and they are more likely to believe that there is truth in religions differing from their own than at any prior time in the nation’s history.
Obama is the perfect symbol of this current American brand of belief. He was raised in an atheist’s home but also by a woman who wanted her children to understand the world. Obama’s mother made sure he experienced every type of religious expression, from Jewish to Hindu and from native Hawaiian to Buddhist, to name but a few. Then there were the years in Indonesia, where he attended first a Roman Catholic and then a public school, all the while practicing an informal type of Islam at his stepfather’s side. Yes, he prayed at a mosque on some Fridays. Yes, he invoked the blessings of Allah.
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Already in his first months in office, then, he has hosted a Jewish Seder, attended a Baptist church, and put a Pentecostal in charge of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and Neighborhood Partnerships. He invited a gay Episcopal bishop to speak at an inaugural event, but he also asked the most prominent American evangelical of our time to give an opening prayer. And when he spoke at the University of Notre Dame recently, he both honored the Catholic tradition and defied that faith’s stand against abortion rights, all the while saying we must carve out a new unity on the issue of abortion. And this is what we can expect a big tent faith-based presidency, rooted in a non-traditional approach to Christianity yet seeking to draw in nearly every religious tradition. For this, he understands, is how the majority of the people he serves would want it to be.
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