Obama's Unique Road to Faith

White House goes on the offensive

(NEWSER) - Unlike his predecessors, President Obama prefers to keep his expressions of religious faith private, Michael D. Shear writes in the Washington Post , recounting the president's unpublicized decision to have a prayer session with three Christian pastors on his 49th birthday. He often consults spiritual advisers but hasn't joined a church in DC because "Michelle and I have realized we are very disruptive to services." That discretion may help explain why some 18% of Americans think he's Muslim. More»

Candidate chose Christianity over mom's humanism, dad's Islam

(NEWSER) - The Times retraces Barack Obama's peripatetic path to the Christianity he embraced 20 years ago and now invokes as he presents his presidential campaign in nothing short of biblical terms. Obama's mother was an anthropologist who schooled her son in the variety of religious experiences; his father's family in Kenya is Muslim. More»

(NEWSER) - The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has no hard feelings against President Obama and will speak to him again when able, the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press reports. Wright, at a ministers conference, said, “them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in 5 years when he’s a lame duck, or in 8 years when he’s out of office.” More»

Or Niebuhrian waffler?

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama may be on the brink of the presidency, but many still wonder whether he’s a closet radical, Michael Gerson writes in the Washington Post. He carries a liberal Illinois legislature record, associations with Ayers, Alinsky, Wright, and ACORN, and an “elitist disdain for bitter, God-clinging conservatives,” Gerson notes. But in reality, Obama seems to see himself as “a reconciler of opposites,” and “transcender of stale debates.” More»

(NEWSER) - The presidential candidates will put their spiritual views on display tomorrow night, appearing with Rick Warren, the country's most popular pastor, at his megachurch in California. The back-to-back 1-hour interviews are clear signs of both the importance of religion in the campaign and the emergence of a new type of evangelical preacher, the Christian Science Monitor reports. More»