The Irony of Barack Obama

Barack Obama, Reinhold Niebuhr and the Problem of Christian Statecraft

R. Ward Holder, Peter B. Josephson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317026976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Politics

Drawing on the political theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, described by Barack Obama as 'one of my favourite philosophers', this book assesses the challenges facing the President during his first term. It evaluates his success in adhering to Niebuhr's path of 'Christian realism' when faced with the pragmatic demands of domestic and foreign affairs. In 2008 Candidate Obama used the ideas of 'Hope' and 'Change' to inspire voters and secure the presidency. Obama promised change not only regarding America's policies, but even more fundamentally in the nation's political culture. Holder and Josephson describe the foundations of President Obama's Christian faith and the extent to which it has shaped his approach to politics. Their book explores Obama's journey of faith in the context of a broadly Augustinian understanding of faith and politics, examines the tensions between Christian realism and pragmatic progressivism, explains why a Christian realist interpretation is essential to understanding Obama's presidency, and applies this model of understanding to considerations of foreign and domestic policy. By combining this theological and political analysis the book offers a special opportunity to reflect on the relationship between Christian faith and statesmanship, reflections that are missing from current popular discussions of the Obama presidency. Through consideration of Niebuhr's models of the prophet and the statesman, and the more popular alternative of the political evangelist, Holder and Josephson are better able to explain the president's successes and his failures, and to unveil the Augustinian limits of the political life.

Chapter 1
The Promise of Barack Obama

Introduction

The Christian, and perhaps the religious person generally, faces two moral obligations. The Christian must render to Caesar—or to the regime—what properly belongs to the regime, and render to God what properly belongs to God.¹ These two obligations do not fit neatly together; in their essential qualities, they conflict. In describing the earthly and heavenly cities—“two different and contrary cities” marked by two very different loves—Augustine of Hippo remarks that our political lives are bound on one side by a yoke of necessity and on the other by our ignorance; we must act, and we lack the wisdom to act.² The obligation of a universal faith that commands love confronts and critiques the obligations of politics which commands citizens to prefer the interests of their own nation.³ In America at the beginning of the twenty-first century we can witness this tension in debates about social issues like abortion and immigration, but also in debates about foreign policy (does the United States have a moral obligation to assist others?) and economic policy (may the state require us to care for one another?).

As an especially religious nation America has struggled with Augustine’s distinction. The relation of religious faith and political action has long been a contentious issue for the United States, and while such contention may be most evident in recent times on the political and religious right, earlier movements for temperance and abolition in the mid-nineteenth century, for the rights of labor at the turn of the twentieth century, and for civil rights in the second half of the twentieth century all grounded their articulation on foundations of faith. The question of faith and its relationship to politics seems particularly acute in the early twenty-first century in America.⁴ From debates over “a mosque at Ground Zero” to the demand that public schools “teach the controversy” to the clamor whenever a political leader participates in a religious revival, one can hardly cast a stone without hitting a target of religious controversy.

Into that context, Barack Obama staked his claim on a rather obscure Cold War theologian. In an interview with David Brooks, then-Senator Obama called Reinhold Niebuhr one of his favorite philosophers, and explained that he drew from Niebuhr “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate these things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”⁵ Somewhere between evangelical and fundamentalist religious fervor on the right and liberal disregard for religion on the left, Obama found in Niebuhr an argument for action that rejects triumphalism and denies perfectionism.

Obama’s Claim

The president’s association with Niebuhr’s thought and politics has become a recurring theme of political commentary. George Packer of the New Yorker has examined this connection,⁶ and so has Casey Blake at The New Republic.⁷ James Kloppenberg has reviewed Obama’s readings in college courses, and has observed the number of Niebuhr’s works that Obama would have read as a student. Kloppenberg found that Obama had a significant knowledge of and appreciation for Reinhold Niebuhr.⁸ Richard Harries and Stephen Platten, the editors of Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics: God and Power, dedicated the book to Barack Obama, tacitly signaling their own recognition of this relationship.⁹ In February 2010 CNN offered an appraisal of the president’s first year in office entitled “How Obama’s Favorite Theologian Shaped His First Year.” John Blake of CNN also published an article of the same name.¹⁰ The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life sponsored a conversation between Wilfred McClay and E.J. Dionne, Jr. on the topic, entitled “Obama’s Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr.”¹¹ Particularly in the wake of his Nobel Prize speech, commentators recognized in the president’s rhetoric the themes of Niebuhr’s great work on American foreign policy, The Irony of American History. In the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly’s Review of 2009, none of the roundtable participants questioned the realism of Barack Obama’s Oslo speech, or Obama’s debt to Niebuhr, even as some noted that this position disappointed some liberals.¹² David Gibson, Michael Gerson, James Fallows, and Fred Kaplan all wrote commentaries on the speech that investigated its Niebuhrian influence. Hendrik Hertzberg quoted the historian William Lee Miller: “It seemed to me as thoroughly Niebuhrian an utterance as we are ever likely to hear a sitting president utter.”¹³

The association of Obama administration policy with Niebuhr’s philosophy extends also to the areas of health care reform and economic policy. Casey Blake sees in Obama’s comments to Brooks a thoughtful consideration of Niebuhr’s social ethics as described in Moral Man and Immoral Society.¹⁴ Mac McCorkle, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry, also identifies Niebuhrian statecraft in the president’s approach to health care and economic reform.¹⁵George Packer argues that Obama’s approach to politics has been “conservative” in a Niebuhrian way: the president acts more like “a community organizer” and less like “an engineer of human souls.”¹⁶ In the early part of the twenty-first century, American political commentators re-discovered Niebuhr, and re-engaged with his thought. Liam Julian, writing in Policy Review, observes a “Niebuhr resurgence,” a product, he believes, of our chastened and uncertain times.¹⁷ And it is not only political columnists and academics who have taken up this theme. Israeli President Shimon Peres has observed Obama’s interest in Niebuhr. In a profile by Mark Bowden, Vice President Joe Biden noted, Obama “really starts off almost everything from a moral and ideological construct.” Referencing Niebuhr’s influence in particular Biden added, Obama “really does think about the social contract. I mean, the guy’s thought it through.”¹⁸ Obama’s attachment to Niebuhr was at first remarkable, and by the fall of 2011 was well accepted.

“Instant analysis” is, of course, an oxymoron, and yet especially in the case of Barack Obama we see an impulse to evaluate and forecast on the fly. In the particular case of the influence of Niebuhr the forecasters rush to claim that Obama is fully Niebuhrian, or insufficiently Niebuhrian, or concentrate upon what a “Niebuhrian” president might do. Neo-conservative thinkers have taken up the issue, finding arguments in Niebuhr for a robust use of military force in foreign policy as a moral imperative. Some even go so far as to criticize Obama for not being a “true” Niebuhrian.¹⁹ Public intellectuals on the left have also rushed to analyze this relationship, seeing opportunities for an Obama administration that addresses some of the fundamental structures of American government and society in order to create greater social justice.²⁰ Christian analysts from liberal and fundamentalist camps have weighed in as well, seeing both possibilities and calamities in this relationship.²¹

In acknowledging Niebuhr’s influence on his own thinking, President Obama offers a unique opportunity to reflect on the relation between Christian faith and American politics, a reflection that is missing from most current discussions of the Obama presidency. Obama’s faith is important to him, both personally and in his political life. Barack Obama has received extraordinary scrutiny over the issue of his faith, and a significant portion of the American electorate continues to believe that he is not Christian. Yet there is extensive evidence of Obama’s Christian journey. We echo the words of the Book of Acts, that it is God who knows the hearts of humans (Acts 15.8). We do not claim to know, and in fact deny that any human can know, the innermost thoughts of another. Any discussion of Obama’s faith must be conducted from the perspective of human evidence.

The proof of Obama’s commitment to his faith is demonstrable. He was writing about his faith long before he ran for president. In his memoir Dreams From My Father, originally published in 1995, Obama wrote about Trinity Church, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The issue was clearly important to him in his 2004 campaign for United States Senate (when he traveled to campaign events with his Bible in the front seat of his car).²² In his The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, Obama included an entire chapter on the subject of faith. Barack Obama had already been a member of Trinity Congregational Church in Chicago for over 20 years when he began his run for the presidency. In a well-known 2004 interview with Cathleen Falsani, Obama described his path to the Christian faith and its impact on him, describing Jesus as both “an historical figure” and “a bridge between God and man,” and criticizing some Democrats for “shying away” from expressions of religious faith.²³ “I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That same year in a forum at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, candidate Obama again declared, “Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him,” and then described how that relationship shapes his outlook on the work of politics.²⁴

Obama’s personal journey speaks to how he has sought to find answers to his own pressing questions through religious seeking and introspection. His discussions of race and religion paint a picture of a young man searching for meaning in traditional sources—community and religion. That search led him to Chicago; through the community he became more existentially aware of the dimension of faith as a foundation for his work and a source of meaning in his life, and found Christianity. He joined Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and was a faithful member for years. In Trinity United Church of Christ, he found a sense of meaningfulness and communal place that he found undeniably moving.²⁵ He would also hear a brand of Christianity that applied the faith to the problems of society, rather than being limited to the issues of personal morality and salvation. Obama moved along a particular path that eventually brought him to a mainline, black liberationist understanding of Christianity.²⁶

This formation in Christian social action allowed Obama to see the possibilities for applied Christian morality as it related to nationally-scaled problems. Further, in Obama’s community organizing activities in Chicago, he would be faced with the stark reality that a great number of his clients saw the experiences of their lives in spiritual terms, and many saw those experiences in Christian terms of suffering, perseverance, and faith. For that community, it was natural that Jesus Christ would be found working for decent homes, for strong schools, and for a sense of societal fairness. It would not be surprising, then, for Barack Obama to attempt to bring that sense of Christian action into play in the national Democratic party as he moved decisively into its leadership. Appeal to one of the leading Christian political thinkers of the twentieth century serves both a political purpose of extending the Democratic Party’s appeal into Christian communities and households and the theoretical purpose of supplying a context or framework for action. In short, by referencing Niebuhr in particular, Barack Obama suggests a special relationship of theory to practice, word to deed, faith to action.

Obama’s faith is both genuinely held and part of his political program. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated not only a concern to claim the Christian theologian, but Christian faith itself, as a foundation for his politics. Replying to Senator Sam Brownback’s claim that evangelical Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church was “my house,” Obama stated that “This is my house, too. This is God’s House.” Stephen Mansfield has called this the interception of a political long pass.²⁷ Barack Obama chose, as early as his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, to deny the secular tendency in the Democratic party. The reporter David Mendell tells two stories about Obama’s famous speech. Senator John Kerry, the party’s nominee for president, read an advanced copy and was struck by a line that resonated especially with the left: that America is not made up of red states and blue states, “there’s not a liberal American and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.” Apparently Kerry wanted to use the line in his own acceptance speech. Obama had used the line in his stump speech for some time, but he agreed to shorten the section to give Kerry room to make a similar claim, retaining the key phrase for himself. Senator Kerry also asked Obama to remove another phrase, in which the senate candidate declared “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.” This time Obama refused; the reference to a Christian foundation for political action was retained.²⁸ When it came to the most ear-catching section of his convention speech, Obama was willing to compromise. When it came to the association he draws between his faith and his politics, he was not.

Further, Obama has argued for a specific relationship of religions with the American civil religion. Time and again he has sought to find a way for progressive politics to include people of faith in its discussions (as it once did so successfully), and has suggested models that are sympathetic both to religious values and to constitutional restrictions. In doing so, he has been willing to take considerable political heat from the left wing of his own party, members of which frequently misunderstand his religious commitment. (Some express dismay, for example, that Obama did not dismantle the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in his first week in office.) In this special sense Obama’s faith claim is part of an intended political effect: to make people of strong religious commitment comfortable again in the Democratic party.²⁹ He has continued to include faith communities at the White House, organizing a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Promise of Barack Obama
• 2 The President’s Philosopher: Reinhold Niebuhr in the American Century
• 3 The Faith of Barack Obama
• 4 Realism and Moral Purpose in American Foreign Policy
• 5 The Morality of a Society: Economic Power, Political Power and Justice
• 6 The Prophet, the Statesman, and the Nation
• 7 The Irony of Barack Obama
• 8 Politics and Religion: A Lesson
• Bibliography
• Index