Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

There are worse things than such freedom. My mother would live happily as a citizen of the world, stitching together a community of friends wherever she found herself, satisfying her need for meaning in her work and in her children. In such a life I, too, might have contented myself had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.

For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in their ability to “make a way out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.

And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world. Long before it became fashionable among television evangelists, the typical black sermon freely acknowledged that all Christians (including the pastors) could expect to still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced. The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a release, an acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions. In the black community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn’t, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation. You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away — because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.

It was because of these newfound understandings — that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved — that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

DISCUSSIONS OF FAITH are rarely heavy-handed within the confines of the Senate. No one is quizzed on his or her religious affiliation; I have rarely heard God’s name invoked during debate on the floor. The Senate chaplain, Barry Black, is a wise and worldly man, former chief of navy chaplains, an African American who grew up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Baltimore and carries out his limited duties — offering the morning prayer, hosting voluntary Bible study sessions, providing spiritual counseling to those who seek it — with a constant spirit of warmth and inclusiveness. The Wednesday-morning prayer breakfast is entirely optional, bipartisan, and ecumenical (Senator Norm Coleman, who is Jewish, is currently chief organizer on the Republican side); those who choose to attend take turns selecting a passage from Scripture and leading group discussion. Hearing the sincerity, openness, humility, and good humor with which even the most overtly religious senators — men like Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, or Tom Coburn — share their personal faith journeys during these breakfasts, one is tempted to assume that the impact of faith on politics is largely salutary, a check on personal ambition, a ballast against the buffeting winds of today’s headlines and political expediency.

Beyond the Senate’s genteel confines, though, any discussion of religion and its role in politics can turn a bit less civil. Take my Republican opponent in 2004, Ambassador Alan Keyes, who deployed a novel argument for attracting voters in the waning days of the campaign.

“Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” Mr. Keyes proclaimed, “because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.”

This wasn’t the first time that Mr. Keyes had made such pronouncements. After my original Republican opponent had been forced to withdraw in the wake of some awkward disclosures from his divorce file, the Illinois Republican Party, unable to settle on a local candidate, had decided to recruit Mr. Keyes for the task. The fact that Mr. Keyes hailed from Maryland, had never lived in Illinois, had never won an election, and was regarded by many in the national Republican Party as insufferable didn’t deter the Illinois GOP leadership. One Republican colleague of mine in the state senate provided me with a blunt explanation of their strategy: “We got our own Harvard-educated conservative black guy to go up against the Harvard-educated liberal black guy. He may not win, but at least he can knock that halo off your head.”

Mr. Keyes himself was not lacking in confidence. A Ph.D. from Harvard, a protégé of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and U.S. ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council under Ronald Reagan, he had burst into the public eye first as a two-time candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Maryland and then as a two-time candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. He had been clobbered in all four races, but those losses had done nothing to diminish Mr. Keyes’s reputation in the eyes of his supporters; for them, electoral failure seemed only to confirm his uncompromising devotion to conservative principles.

There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat Mr. Keyes could deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, he could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running with sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotion as he called the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil.

Unfortunately for him, neither his intellect nor his eloquence could overcome certain defects as a candidate. Unlike most politicians, for example, Mr. Keyes made no effort to conceal what he clearly considered to be his moral and intellectual superiority. With his erect bearing, almost theatrically formal manner, and a hooded gaze that made him appear perpetually bored, he came off as a cross between a Pentecostal preacher and William F. Buckley.

Moreover, that self-assuredness disabled in him the instincts for self-censorship that allow most people to navigate the world without getting into constant fistfights. Mr. Keyes said whatever popped into his mind, and with dogged logic would follow over a cliff just about any idea that came to him. Already disadvantaged by a late start, a lack of funds, and his status as a carpetbagger, he proceeded during the course of a mere three months to offend just about everybody. He labeled all homosexuals — including Dick Cheney’s daughter—“selfish hedonists,” and insisted that adoption by gay couples inevitably resulted in incest. He called the Illinois press corps a tool of the “anti-marriage, anti-life agenda.” He accused me of taking a “slaveholder’s position” in my defense of abortion rights and called me a “hard-core, academic Marxist” for my support of universal health care and other social programs — and then added for good measure that because I was not the descendant of slaves I was not really African American. At one point he even managed to alienate the conservative Republicans who recruited him to Illinois by recommending — perhaps in a play for black votes — reparations in the form of a complete abolition of the income tax for all blacks with slave ancestry. (“This is a disaster!” sputtered one comment posted on the discussion board of Illinois’s hard-right website, the Illinois Leader. “WHAT ABOUT THE WHITE GUYS!!!”)