Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

“I will pray for you,” she said. “I pray that you have a change of heart.”

Neither my mind nor my heart changed that day, nor did they in the days to come. But I did have that family in mind as I wrote back to the doctor and thanked him for his email. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and had the language on my website changed to state in clear but simple terms my prochoice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own — that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.

IT IS A truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recent surveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fills the Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts of every major metropolis, providing everything from day care to singles mixers to yoga and Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the celestial sidelines.

Of course, such religiosity is hardly new. The Pilgrims came to our shores to escape religious persecution and practice without impediment to their brand of strict Calvinism. Evangelical revivalism has repeatedly swept across the nation, and waves of successive immigrants have used their faith to anchor their lives in a strange new world. Religious sentiment and religious activism have sparked some of our most powerful political movements, from abolition to civil rights to the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan.

Still, if fifty years ago you had asked the most prominent cultural commentators of the time just what the future of religion in America might be, they undoubtedly would have told you it was on the decline. The old-time religion was withering away, it was argued, a victim of science, higher levels of education in the general population, and the marvels of technology. Respectable folks might still attend church every Sunday; Bible-thumpers and faith healers might still work the Southern revival circuit; the fear of “godless communism” might help feed McCarthyism and the Red Scare. But for the most part, traditional religious practice — and certainly religious fundamentalism — was considered incompatible with modernity, at most a refuge of the poor and uneducated from the hardships of life. Even Billy Graham’s monumental crusades were treated as a curious anachronism by pundits and academics, vestiges of an earlier time that had little to do with the serious work of managing a modern economy or shaping foreign policy.

By the time the sixties rolled around, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic leaders had concluded that if America’s religious institutions were to survive, they would have to make themselves “relevant” to changing times — by accommodating church doctrine to science, and by articulating a social gospel that addressed the material issues of economic inequality, racism, sexism, and American militarism.

What happened? In part, the cooling of religious enthusiasm among Americans was always exaggerated. On this score, at least, the conservative critique of “liberal elitism” has a strong measure of truth: Ensconced in universities and large urban centers, academics, journalists, and purveyors of popular culture simply failed to appreciate the continuing role that all manner of religious expression played in communities across the country. Indeed, the failure of the country’s dominant cultural institutions to acknowledge America’s religious impulse helped foster a degree of religious entrepreneurship unmatched elsewhere in the industrialized world. Pushed out of sight but still throbbing with vitality throughout the heartland and the Bible Belt, a parallel universe emerged, a world not only of revivals and thriving ministries but also of Christian television, radio, universities, publishers, and entertainment, all of which allowed the devout to ignore the popular culture as surely as they were being ignored.

The reluctance on the part of many evangelicals to be drawn into politics — their inward focus on individual salvation and willingness to render unto Caesar what is his — might have endured indefinitely had it not been for the social upheavals of the sixties. In the minds of Southern Christians, the decision of a distant federal court to dismantle segregation seemed of a piece with its decisions to eliminate prayer in schools — a multipronged assault on the pillars of traditional Southern life. Across America, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, the increasing assertiveness of gays and lesbians, and most powerfully the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade seemed a direct challenge to the church’s teachings about marriage, sexuality, and the proper roles of men and women. Feeling mocked and under attack, conservative Christians found it no longer possible to insulate themselves from the country’s broader political and cultural trends. And although it was Jimmy Carter who would first introduce the language of evangelical Christianity into modern national politics, it was the Republican Party, with its increasing emphasis on tradition, order, and “family values,” that was best positioned to harvest this crop of politically awakened evangelicals and mobilize them against the liberal orthodoxy.

The story of how Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and finally Karl Rove and George W. Bush mobilized this army of Christian foot soldiers need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that today white evangelical Christians (along with conservative Catholics) are the heart and soul of the Republican Party’s grassroots base — a core following continually mobilized by a network of pulpits and media outlets that technology has only amplified. It is their issues — abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, intelligent design, Terri Schiavo, the posting of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, home schooling, voucher plans, and the makeup of the Supreme Court — that often dominate the headlines and serve as one of the major fault lines in American politics. The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to “get religion,” even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears — rightly, no doubt — that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.

But the growing political influence of the Christian right tells only part of the story. The Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition may have tapped into the discontent of many evangelical Christians, but what is more remarkable is the ability of evangelical Christianity not only to survive but to thrive in modern, high-tech America. At a time when mainline Protestant churches are all losing membership at a rapid clip, nondenominational evangelical churches are growing by leaps and bounds, eliciting levels of commitment and participation from their membership that no other American institution can match. Their fervor has gone mainstream.

There are various explanations for this success, from the skill of evangelicals in marketing religion to the charisma of their leaders. But their success also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds — dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets — and coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them — that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.