US election: Barack Obama's historic victory could change the face of faith in America
Obama's religious conviction is profound but unpoliticised
Amid the celebrations of today's dawn of a new era in American politics, it is worth asking how the expression on the religious face that the United States presents to the rest of the world has changed with the election of Barack Obama as President.
Not being George W. Bush is said to have been a key electoral asset for the Democrat campaign. And it is impossible to imagine that Obama would have used a word like "crusade" in the wake of 9/11, as Bush did in launching his ill-fated "war on terror".
That is symptomatic of a broader point. The Religious Right that so informed Bush's term of office is today one of the more dismayed factions of the US electorate, now that its anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-Muslim agenda will no longer enjoy the kind of traction in the Oval Office that it has done over the past eight years.
But it's when the Religious Right looks from domestic policy to the prospective foreign policy of an Obama administration in the Middle-East that the shift in the tectonic plates of America's public theology becomes most apparent.
It has been alleged that Bush and the Religious Right have been disproportionately influenced by Old Testament prophecies of the "end times" being played out in Israel, where the final battle of Armageddon between the Christ and the forces of evil would be fought, followed by the "rapture" of the righteous to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Whether that was Bush's imperative, or the more earthly and prosaic demands of the security of oil supply, it is axiomatic that the southern Baptist tradition in the States is deeply imbued with the psychology of a "chosen people" living in a "promised land" – an America given them by God (listen to the lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner).
It is hard to deny that the political prevalence of this mentality under Bush infused the US with a sense of mission to save the world. It follows that saviours of the world might believe that they have a somewhat special place in that world.
Obama undoubtedly believes that the US carries a weight of responsibility for ensuring that those who would "tear down" the world do not prevail. He said as much at his acceptance addresses.
But he is not a product of the religious zealotry that is generated by a chosen people in a promised land. The trouble that shadowed his campaign in the shape of Pastor Jeremiah Wright is, it is true, rooted in the latter's congregational evangelicalism. But it is reflective of a religious orthodoxy, not of the fundamentalism of the Religious Right.
It's an important distinction. Obama's religious conviction may be profound and steeped in a social gospel experience of his early work among the dispossessed in Chicago, but it is not a politicised faith, which is the characteristic of fundamentalism.
This is partly because Obama, it has to be said, is not an all-American boy, in the sense that the Religious Right would understand that phrase. A mixed-race and mixed-faith family and upbringing in Indonesia and Hawaii have delivered him a wider and more pluralistic global perspective than is normally associated with chosen-people psychology and rhetoric.
It would be over-optimistic to believe that a new American religious paradigm will now deliver world peace. America's place in the world will remain widely perceived as war-maker, rather than peace-maker. But it may be a start in a better, not to say holier, direction.
By George Pitcher
05/Nov/2008
