Table of Contents
Contents The Life Of Barack Obama: A Chronology....................xi
Introduction....................xiii
1. To Walk Between Worlds....................1
2. My House, Too....................29
3. Faith Fit for the Age....................49
4. The Altars of State....................79
5. Four Faces of Faith....................101
6. A Time to Heal....................129
Acknowledgments....................145
Notes....................149
Bibliography....................157
About the Author....................159
Index....................161
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The FAITH of Barack Obama
By Stephen Mansfield Thomas Nelson Copyright © 2008 Stephen Mansfield
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-59555-250-1
Chapter One To Walk Between Worlds
Bobby Rush is an impressive man. Born in the Deep South town of Albany, Georgia, in 1946, he later moved with his family to Chicago, Illinois, and rose to become a United States congressman. Along the way, he served in the U.S. Army, earned a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, became an ordained Baptist minister, and won such respect in his district on the South Side of Chicago that he is now in his eighth term in office.
He also has the courage of his convictions. He was a cofounder of the Black Panther Party in Illinois and spent years operating a medical clinic and a breakfast program for children. He was a pioneer in drawing attention to the agonies of sickle cell anemia in the black community. Not surprising given his track record, on July 15, 2004, Congressman Rush became only the second sitting U.S. congressman to be arrested-not for corruption or payola scams but for protesting human rights violations at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Truly, Bobby Rush is an impressive man. So, why, in 1999, did thirty-eight-year-old Barack Obama, who had served in the Illinois senate only three years, decide to challenge Bobby Rush for his congressional seat? It could not have been the numbers. Rush's name recognition was more than 90 percent, while Obama's was barely 11. It also could not have been any political differences. Everyone knew that the two men held nearly the same views. It was one of the reasons that Rush often expressed hurt over Obama's challenge.
Whatever moved Obama to run against Rush, it was not a pleasant experience for the younger man. From the outset, Rush's approval rating was more than 70 percent. Then, not long into the campaign, Rush's son, Huey Rich, was tragically shot on his way home from a grocery store. The young man hung between life and death for four days. Though it was distasteful at the time for anyone to mention a political benefit to the tragedy, the outpouring of sympathy did seem to galvanize support for Rush, particularly among undecided voters. Soon billboards arose in the district, proclaiming, "I'm sticking with Bobby."
It never got better for Obama. Even President Clinton entered the fray and supported Rush, breaking his own policy of not endorsing candidates in primaries. Rush won with twice the vote Obama received-approximately 60 percent to 30 percent-and Obama was forced to admit that "[I got] my rear end handed to me."
There had been hurt and bitterness-the bad blood that fierce political battles can leave between men. Years went by, though, and with distance came a mellowing. The same Rush who had once described Obama as a man "blinded by ambition" came, in time, to a different view. After Obama entered the U.S. Senate, Rush said, "I think that Obama-his election to the Senate-was divinely ordered. I'm a preacher and pastor. I know that was God's plan. Obama has certain qualities. I think he is being used for some purpose."
Rush is not alone in this. Increasingly, words such as called, chosen, and anointed are being used of Obama. Though these terms have long belonged to the native language of the Religious Right, they are now becoming the comfortable expressions of an awakened Religious Left, of a faith-based Progressive movement. Moreover, they are framing the image of Barack Obama in the minds of millions of Americans.
Perhaps this should be expected. Perhaps this is nothing more than a by-product of the uniquely American need to paint politics and politicians in messianic terms. Perhaps this is what comes, in part, from a people believing themselves a chosen nation.
Yet what is unique about the use of such terms as applied to Barack Obama is how foreign they are to the religious worldview of his early life. We must remember that if he ascends to the presidency in 2009, he will be the first American president to do so having not been raised in a Christian home. Instead, he spent his early years under the influence of atheism, folk Islam, and a humanist's understanding of the world that sees religion merely as a man-made thing, as a product of psychology. It is this departure from tradition in Obama's early years that makes both his political journey and his religious journey so unusual and of such symbolic meaning in American public life.
* * *
The story of the religious influences that have shaped Barack Obama is best begun with the novel faith of his grandmother, Madelyn Payne. She was born in 1922 to strict Methodist parents in the oil boom town of Augusta, Kansas. Though modern Methodists are known more for their eagerness to accommodate the sensitivities of secular society-removing offensive "gender bias" from their hymns, for example-the Midwest Methodists of the 1920s and 1930s exacted a higher price for righteousness. There was no drinking, card playing, or dancing in the Payne household. In church on Sundays, the family heard often of how small the army of the saved truly is compared to the vast numbers of those in the world who are going to hell. There were, too, the petty tyrannies that often attend religion in a flawed world: people shunned one another, lived lives at odds with the gospel they claimed to hold dear, and failed to distinguish themselves in any meaningful way from the world around them.
These hypocrisies were not lost on Madelyn Payne. She would tell her grandson often of the "sanctimonious preachers" she had known and of the respectable church ladies with absurd hats who whispered hurtful secrets and treated those they deemed beneath them with cruelty. What folly, she would recall with disgust, that a people would be taught to ignore all the geologic evidence and believe that the earth and the heavens had been created in seven days. What injustice, she would insist, that men who sat on church boards should utter "racial epithets" and cheat the men who worked for them. Barack regularly heard such bitter sentiments in his grandparents' home, sentiments that profoundly shaped his early religious worldview.
Madelyn was frequently described by neighbors as "different," a gentle word for her eccentricities, and few were likely surprised when she met, and then secretly married, Stanley Dunham, a furniture salesman from nearby El Dorado. If the marriage was not exactly the attraction of opposites, it was at least the blending of incongruities. He was notoriously loud, crashing, and gregarious; friends said he could "charm the legs off of a couch." She was bookish and sensitive. He was a Baptist from a blue-collar world. She was a Methodist whose parents were solidly middle class. Though in their generation these seemingly slight differences were enough to separate couples of less determination, Stanley and Madelyn fell in love and later married on the night of a junior/senior prom just weeks before her high school graduation in 1940. For reasons that remain unclear, her parents were not told of the union until her diploma was well in hand. They did not receive the news well, though this seemed to make little difference to the headstrong and increasingly rebellious Madelyn.
With the onset of World War II, Stanley enlisted in the army and ended up slogging through Europe with General George Patton's tank corps without ever seeing real combat. Madelyn worked as a riveter at the Boeing Company's B-29 plant in Wichita. In late November 1942, their daughter, Ann Dunham, was born.
Stanley Dunham has been described as a kind of Willy Loman, the tragic, broken character in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. There are similarities. Returning from war and grasping the promise of the GI Bill, Stanley moved his young family to California, where he enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley. Obama would later recount kindly of his grandfather that "the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved on." It was the pattern of a lifetime. There was first a return to Kansas and then years of one small Texas town after another, one dusty furniture store leading to the promise of bigger rewards at still another store farther up the road.
Finally, in 1955, just as Ann finished the seventh grade, the family moved to Seattle, where Stanley acquired a job as a salesman for Standard-Grunbaum Furniture, a recognized feature of the downtown area at the corner of Second and Pine. For most of their five years in Seattle, the family lived on Mercer Island, "a South America-shaped stretch of Douglas firs and cedars," which lay across from the city in Lake Washington. While Stanley sold living room suites and Madelyn worked for a bank, young Ann began drinking from the troubled currents of the counterculture just then beginning to sweep through American society.
The high school that Ann attended was far from the stereotypical 1950s image. In the very year that she began classes at Mercer High, John Stenhouse, chairman of the school's board, admitted before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he was a member of the Communist Party. Already at Mercer, there were recurring parental firestorms over the curriculum, long before such conflicts became commonplace throughout the nation. Most complaints centered on the ideas of Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, two instructors who were perceived as so radical for the time that students called the passageway between their classrooms "Anarchy Hall." Together the two men had determined, without apology, to incite their students to both question and challenge all authority.
Foubert, who taught English, assigned books such as Atlas Shrugged, The Organization Man, The Hidden Persuaders, 1984, and the most strident of H. L. Mencken's cultural commentaries-none of which are extreme by today's standard but which were certainly out of the mainstream in 1950s America. Wichterman, who taught philosophy, assigned Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, and did not hesitate to question the existence of God. Parental upheavals ensued, which Foubert and Wichterman dubbed "Mother Marches." "The kids started questioning things that their folks thought shouldn't be questioned-religion, politics, parental authority," John Hunt, a student at the time, remembered, "and a lot of parents didn't like that and tried to get them [Wichterman and Foubert] fired."
None of this upheaval was of much concern to Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, though. Having long before shed the quaint faith and suffocating values of rural Kansas, Ann's parents were comfortable with the innovations in the Mercer High School curriculum. They had even begun attending East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue-often referred to in Seattle as "the little Red church on the hill"-for its liberal theology and politics. Barack would later describe this as the family's "only skirmish into organized religion" and explain that Stanley "liked the idea that Unitarians drew on the scriptures of all the great religions," excitedly proclaiming, "It's like you get five religions in one!" "For Christ's sake," Madelyn would shoot back, according to Barack, "It's not supposed to be like buying breakfast cereal!"
Though what has come to be known as the Unitarian Affirmation of Faith is, in fact, an overly simplistic reworking of the ideas of James Freeman Clarke, it does serve to hint at what the Dunhams accepted as true: "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of mankind onward and upward forever." That Stanley and Madelyn believed in a God of some description is confirmed by Barack. However, they were likely skeptics-Barack says that Madelyn espoused a "flinty rationalism"-regarding the divinity of Jesus, whom they would have accepted as one good moral teacher among many but certainly not a god. That man is perfectible, that men ought to live as brothers, and that society would climb ever upward if they did are all truths that were agreed upon in the Dunham home, though Ann would in time accept these possibilities only on the most secular terms.
In truth, Ann Dunham was already on a journey beyond the freethinking of her parents, beyond her friends at Mercer High School, and yet in keeping with the philosophical trends of her times. She had absorbed the broad spirituality and social vision of the East Shore Unitarian Church. She had also been paying attention in the classrooms of Foubert and Wichterman. Having begun with her parents' religious skepticism, Ann went even further and declared herself an atheist.
During after-school gab sessions in the coffee shops of Seattle, her friends began to realize how fully Ann had thought through her beliefs. "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," remembers Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't." Another classmate, Jill Burton-Dascher, recalls that Ann "was intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way." "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world," Chip Wall, a friend, explains, "[Ann] would know about it first." She was, he says, "a fellow traveler.... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."
As the decade of the 1960s dawned and Ann approached the end of her high school career, friends expected she might chart a bold course: college at a European university perhaps, or studies back east among the nation's Ivy League. They soon heard that Stanley had found a new job-yet another furniture store with yet bolder promises of success-this time in Hawaii. Though some remember that Ann did not want to go, it was not long before letters began arriving from Honolulu, describing how she had enrolled in the University of Hawaii for the fall term of 1960.
Only the year before, Hawaii had achieved statehood. This was likely part of the attraction for Stanley. His adventurous, ever-unsatisfied soul yearned for what appeared to be a new frontier. A fresh start in a new state, far from the American mainland, seemed ideal. He was entering his forties-the onset of midlife crisis for most men-his only daughter had just finished high school, and the darkness of the 1960s had yet to descend. Life was full of promise, though for Stanley this would mean going where that promise lived: a new place, a new role, a new crowd to charm.
He could not have known that it would be the last move of his life or that he would eventually pass his days in a small Honolulu apartment, if not embittered then at least disillusioned by his few achievements. He could not have known that in the meantime, his wife would rise to become the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii and would do so without a college degree, an astonishing achievement for a woman in that era. And he could not have known that his life would be both graced and anguished by the comings and goings of his daughter and the little biracial boy she would bring into the world.
* * *
Ann Dunham met Barack Obama Sr. while she was a freshman and he a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. He must have appeared exotic to her, with his rich, full voice; his Kenyan accent; his chiseled features; and his studied worldliness. He had come to Hawaii on the wings of extreme good fortune: his government had sent him abroad to study on a scholarship created for the rising leaders of Jomo Kenyatta's Kenya. Though he now spent weekends with Ann, listening to jazz, drinking beer, and debating politics and world affairs with their friends, he had only a few years before lived a Kenyan village life, herding goats and submitting to the rituals of a village witch doctor. Now, in the West, he had rejected the Muslim faith of his youth just as he rejected the babblings of all witch doctors. Religion is superstition, he insisted. It falls to man to fashion his own fate and the fate of his nation. This was what he intended to do when he finished school and returned to Kenya.
Things moved quickly for Ann and her new love. Sometime late in the fall of 1960, she conceived a child. Several months into 1961, she and Barack married, and six months later, friends in Seattle were receiving letters announcing the birth of their son, Barack Hussein Obama, born August 4, 1961.
What followed immediately after is now well-known. Barack Obama Sr. continued to live in Hawaii only a short time after the birth of the son who bore his name. An opportunity to earn his doctorate at Harvard proved too enticing, and he left, to return only once more before his death in 1982 of alcohol, bitterness, and a car crash. The pictures of young Barack make it hard to imagine any father walking away from such a child. In time, Ann and Barack would learn that Barack Sr. had been married in a Kenyan village ceremony long before he met Ann and already had other children. She would file for divorce in 1964.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The FAITH of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Mansfield. Excerpted by permission.
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