Pray for Defeat?

I am still troubled by an e-mail I received the other day from a Republican asking all who receive it to stop what they are doing each night at 7 p.m. and join in a mass effort, as Christians, to pray for the defeat of the one “leading in national polls,” but who does not “share our Christian values.” The not so subtle reference was to Barack Obama, of course, a devout Christian.

You can see why I am confused and troubled.

John McCain is the guy who divorced his wife when he came home from Vietnam. She had been in a terrible auto accident and just “wouldn’t do” anymore, I guess. He is also the guy who “dated” everything in skirts up and down the East Coast during his days as Navy liaison to the US Senate. He is also the guy who admitted that for a time he “dated” a stripper. He is also the guy who told intimates he was going to leave the Navy to run for Congress from a district in Florida because he had found a rich maiden who could support such an effort. He is the same guy who a few weeks later told the same intimates he had changed his mind, that he had met another beauty (Cindy McCain) in a Hawaiian bar and would be moving to Arizona soon to marry her and run for the Congress from a district to be identified there.

John McCain cannot be the real Christian, can he?

I’m having trouble finding the Christian life in John McCain. Let’s look at the other guy. Obama has been married to only one woman and devotedly so. He came to his Christianity through a long and circuitous faith journey and soul searching that brought him to Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago where he made his commitment.

We gain some useful insight into the faith of Barack Obama when we review comments he made in a 2006 speech at a conference sponsored by Jim Wallis’s Sojourners organization.

In that speech, his message to the political Left was stop rejecting people of faith and instead find common ground. To the Right, he said you need to recognize the “critical role that the separation of church and state has played” in America. “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Then he said something most revealing: “And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passage of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful our own Defense Department would survive its application? So, before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.”

The speech served as the basis for the chapter on faith in Obama’s The Audacity of Hope.

There is more, much more, in his speech that I commend to those who seek more insight into the faith journey of this thoughtful man. A comment near the end of the speech is worth repeating. He says religion ought to change its voice when entering the public square. "Democracy demands,” he argued, “that the religiously motivated translate their concern into universal rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amendable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teaching of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

I don’t know about you, but Barack Obama is the kind of Christian I want in the White House – probing, asking questions, doubting, yet faithful and grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition, someone who will use the precepts of his faith to unite us.