Charles T. Mathewes: Obama Speech on Race and Religion

It was easily the most significant public statement on race by a major politician and, at the same time, the most significant addition to the canon on civil religion in America in forty years.

Some things were predictable, most obviously the generic religious inclusivism--the demand to follow the Golden Rule, which "all the world's great religions demand" (which raises the question whether there are any mediocre religions, and if so what do they demand? I don't know. Would that be the Aztecs?). But much of this speech was really quite new. In several important ways it did not reinforce the received categories of civil religion, but transcended and transfigured them.

I had suspected that for Obama to engage these issues, he would have to engage them on multiple registers--political, theological, personal. He did it all, and he did it in a way that caused all three to interrelate in powerful and mutually reinforcing ways.

The rhetoric he used was obviously deeply theological. By naming the "original sin" of America as chattel slavery, he anchored the historical and political situation at a level of profundity that most people, white and black, feel is the only appropriate one for this crime. As for playing up the connections between union and perfection in the Constitution's expressed desire to form a "more perfect union," he did not shy away from the extremely ambitious--dare I say audacious?--and extremely demanding language of moral perfection. But he also acknowledged that this perfection is not available to us as what Reinhold Niebuhr would call "a simple possibility."

The speech ended with a beginning, not an ending--with a call to renewed effort, not a lullaby to put the nation to sleep. America is a messianic nation, a nation with profound eschatological pretensions, at least from time to time. But Obama was not indulging in self-congratulation. Rather, he urged the nation to take with ever greater seriousness the moral and, indeed, religious obligations that those pretensions put upon all citizens.

He presented his personal role in this in deeply human, non-messianic ways. Against the many emotions that swirl around his candidacy and the complicated investment that many people, black and white, have in his campaign, he did not present himself as the solution to the problem, but the site where the problem can be felt most profoundly. It was, to speak in a theological register again, a deeply confessional account: "These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love." Of course, he can do this because of who he is, as half black and half white, with white and black family who love him but mistrust the other race in which he shares. He literally embodies the change he seeks to enact. He did not suggest that this was a solution, but rather the site where work needs to be done. Thus, a deeply personal moment became more than just a personal message. This time it came with some demands on the nation as a whole that leave the nation with a task.

I don't think the theological language was simply frosting on a wholly secular cake. Rather, theology was put to work, naming our condition and illuminating a way forward. Most interesting on this point was Obama's diagnosis of the nation's "racial stalemate" as a matter of escapism or avoidance--a problem, he suggested, rooted in our collective failure to engage one another, a failure both political and theological, a failure to be a people and to have hope. His criticism of Jeremiah Wright, among others, was a criticism of Wright's partial and despairing vision, his insistence that America is "static," that the proper response to our situation is to reinforce the patterns and expectations we have, rather than step out of them and do a new thing. Furthermore, by framing the choice as one between two stark options, Obama echoed deep biblical patterns. Most obviously, he echoed Deuteronomy: "I have set before you life and death...choose life." But more than that, he drew from the language of the Hebrew prophets the idea that God is doing a "new thing," that God is not just a marble edifice but a living God who demands something of the people now and in the future. The theological language was not being used to compliment America, but to obligate it.

This use of "new thing," it seems to me, is a genuine innovation in the rhetoric of "America as religious mission." Or if it is not entirely an innovation--after all, the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States does say Novus Ordo Seclorum, "A New Order of the Ages"--it was nonetheless never used in this way (at least not by anyone else from outside Illinois). This enabled Obama to express a faith in God and a faith "in the American people" in such a way that it wasn't idolatrous, but simply an expression of hope. And, most importantly, he called upon America to begin--to start to do something. This is a use of civil religion not rooted in apocalyptic endings, or titanic final battles between good and evil, but a struggle inside the nation, and inside each soul, between hope and fear.

Is he right? Is America ready for this? I suppose we won't know unless we try. Obama's prophetic stance--to use yet again a vastly overused metaphor, but one that fits this moment better than any since Martin Luther King Jr.--has some evidence behind it. After all, this is a man who burst onto the national scene not even four years ago, as a candidate in his first race for federal office, and he is now the leading candidate for Democratic nominee for president. It would be hard to dismiss that empirical evidence. But I think it is a harder fight than we might think, in the afterglow of hearing that remarkable speech.

--Charles T. Mathewes is an associate professor of religious ethics and the history of Christian thought at the University of Virginia and the author of A THEOLOGY OF PUBLIC LIFE (Cambridge University Press, 2007).