TWO DAYS AFTER I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, Ireceived an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School.

　　“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win,” the doctor wrote.

　　“I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering votingfor you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end,prevent me from supporting you.”

　　The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to becomprehensive and “totalizing.” His faith led him to strongly oppose abortion and gaymarriage, but he said his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free marketand the quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of President Bush’sforeign policy.

　　The reason the doctor was considering voting for my opponent was not my position onabortion as such. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on mywebsite, suggesting that I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away awoman’s right to choose.” He went on to write:

　　I sense that you have a strong sense of justice and of the precarious position of justice inany polity, and I know that you have championed the plight of the voiceless. I alsosense that you are a fair-minded person with a high regard for reason…. Whatever yourconvictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologuesdriven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, arenot fair-minded…. You know that weenter times that are fraught with possibilities forgood and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity inthe context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making anyclaims that involve others…. I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, onlythat you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.

　　I checked my website and found the offending words. They were not my own; my staffhad posted them to summarize my prochoice position during the Democratic primary, ata time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v.

　　Wade. Within the bubble of Democratic Party politics, this was standard boilerplate,designed to fire up the base. The notion of engaging the other side on the issue waspointless, the argument went; any ambiguity on the issue implied weakness, and facedwith the single-minded, give-no-quarter approach of antiabortion forces, we simplycould not afford weakness.

　　Rereading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. Yes, I thought, there werethose in the antiabortion movement for whom I had no sympathy, those who jostled orblocked women who were entering clinics, shoving photographs of mangled fetuses inthe women’s faces and screaming at the top of their lungs; those who bullied andintimidated and occasionally resorted to violence.

　　But those antiabortion protesters weren’t the ones who occasionally appeared at mycampaign rallies. The ones I encountered usually showed up in the smaller, downstatecommunities that we visited, their expressions weary but determined as they stood insilent vigil outside whatever building in which the rally was taking place, theirhandmade signs or banners held before them like shields. They didn’t yell or try todisrupt our events, although they still made my staff jumpy. The first time a group ofprotesters showed up, my advance team went on red alert; five minutes before myarrival at the meeting hall, they called the car I was in and suggested that I slip inthrough the rear entrance to avoid a confrontation.

　　“I don’t want to go through the back,” I told the staffer driving me. “Tell them we’recoming through the front.”

　　We turned into the library parking lot and saw seven or eight protesters gathered along afence: several older women and what looked to be a family—a man and woman withtwo young children. I got out of the car, walked up to the group, and introduced myself.

　　The man shook my hand hesitantly and told me his name. He looked to be about myage, in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a St. Louis Cardinals cap. His wife shook my hand aswell, but the older women kept their distance. The children, maybe nine or ten yearsold, stared at me with undisguised curiosity.

　　“You folks want to come inside?” I asked.

　　“No, thank you,” the man said. He handed me a pamphlet. “Mr. Obama, I want you toknow that I agree with a lot of what you have to say.”

　　“I appreciate that.”

　　“And I know you’re a Christian, with a family of your own.”

　　“That’s true.”

　　“So how can you support murdering babies?”

　　I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my beliefthat few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any pregnantwoman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and wrestled with her consciencewhen making that heart-wrenching decision; that I feared a ban on abortion would forcewomen to seek unsafe abortions, as they had once done in this country and as theycontinued to do in countries that prosecute abortion doctors and the women who seektheir services. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number ofwomen who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.

　　The man listened politely and then pointed to statistics on the pamphlet listing thenumber of unborn children that, according to him, were sacrificed every year. After afew minutes, I said I had to go inside to greet my supporters and asked again if thegroup wanted to come in. Again the man declined. As I turned to go, his wife called outto me.

　　“I will pray for you,” she said. “I pray that you have a change of heart.”

　　Neither my mind nor my heart changed that day, nor did they in the days to come. But Idid have that family in mind as I wrote back to the doctor and thanked him for hisemail. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and had the language on mywebsite changed to state in clear but simple terms my prochoice position. And thatnight, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own—that I might extend the samepresumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.

　　IT IS A truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recentsurveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to achurch, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more peoplebelieve in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places ofworship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fillsthe Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts ofevery major metropolis, providing everything from day care to singles mixers to yogaand Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart,and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were callingplays from the celestial sidelines.

　　Of course, such religiosity is hardly new. The Pilgrims came to our shores to escapereligious persecution and practice without impediment to their brand of strict Calvinism.

　　Evangelical revivalism has repeatedly swept across the nation, and waves of successiveimmigrants have used their faith to anchor their lives in a strange new world. Religioussentiment and religious activism have sparked some of our most powerful politicalmovements, from abolition to civil rights to the prairie populism of William JenningsBryan.

　　Still, if fifty years ago you had asked the most prominent cultural commentators of thetime just what the future of religion in America might be, they undoubtedly would havetold you it was on the decline. The old-time religion was withering away, it was argued,a victim of science, higher levels of education in the general population, and the marvelsof technology. Respectable folks might still attend church every Sunday; Bible-thumpers and faith healers might still work the Southern revival circuit; the fear of“godless communism” might help feed McCarthyism and the Red Scare. But for themost part, traditional religious practice—and certainly religious fundamentalism—wasconsidered incompatible with modernity, at most a refuge of the poor and uneducatedfrom the hardships of life. Even Billy Graham’s monumental crusades were treated as acurious anachronism by pundits and academics, vestiges of an earlier time that had littleto do with the serious work of managing a modern economy or shaping foreign policy.

　　By the time the sixties rolled around, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic leadershad concluded that if America’s religious institutions were to survive, they would haveto make themselves “relevant” to changing times—by accommodating church doctrineto science, and by articulating a social gospel that addressed the material issues ofeconomic inequality, racism, sexism, and American militarism.

　　What happened? In part, the cooling of religious enthusiasm among Americans wasalways exaggerated. On this score, at least, the conservative critique of “liberal elitism”

　　has a strong measure of truth: Ensconced in universities and large urban centers,academics, journalists, and purveyors of popular culture simply failed to appreciate thecontinuing role that all manner of religious expression played in communities across thecountry. Indeed, the failure of the country’s dominant cultural institutions toacknowledge America’s religious impulse helped foster a degree of religiousentrepreneurship unmatched elsewhere in the industrialized world. Pushed out of sightbut still throbbing with vitality throughout the heartland and the Bible Belt, a paralleluniverse emerged, a world not only of revivals and thriving ministries but also ofChristian television, radio, universities, publishers, and entertainment, all of whichallowed the devout to ignore the popular culture as surely as they were being ignored.

　　The reluctance on the part of many evangelicals to be drawn into politics—their inwardfocus on individual salvation and willingness to render unto Caesar what is his—mighthave endured indefinitely had it not been for the social upheavals of the sixties. In theminds of Southern Christians, the decision of a distant federal court to dismantlesegregation seemed of a piece with its decisions to eliminate prayer in schools—amultipronged assault on the pillars of traditional Southern life. Across America, thewomen’s movement, the sexual revolution, the increasing assertiveness of gays andlesbians, and most powerfully the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade seemed adirect challenge to the church’s teachings about marriage, sexuality, and the proper rolesof men and women. Feeling mocked and under attack, conservative Christians found itno longer possible to insulate themselves from the country’s broader political andcultural trends. And although it was Jimmy Carter who would first introduce thelanguage of evangelical Christianity into modern national politics, it was the RepublicanParty, with its increasing emphasis on tradition, order, and “family values,” that wasbest positioned to harvest this crop of politically awakened evangelicals and mobilizethem against the liberal orthodoxy.

　　The story of how Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and finallyKarl Rove and George W. Bush mobilized this army of Christian foot soldiers need notbe repeated here. Suffice it to say that today white evangelical Christians (along withconservative Catholics) are the heart and soul of the Republican Party’s grassrootsbase—a core following continually mobilized by a network of pulpits and media outletsthat technology has only amplified. It is their issues—abortion, gay marriage, prayer inschools, intelligent design, Terri Schiavo, the posting of the Ten Commandments in thecourthouse, home schooling, voucher plans, and the makeup of the Supreme Court—that often dominate the headlines and serve as one of the major fault lines in Americanpolitics. The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is notbetween men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and thosewho reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those whodon’t. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to “get religion,” even as a core segmentof our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears—rightly, nodoubt—that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for themor their life choices.

　　But the growing political influence of the Christian right tells only part of the story. TheMoral Majority and the Christian Coalition may have tapped into the discontent ofmany evangelical Christians, but what is more remarkable is the ability of evangelicalChristianity not only to survive but to thrive in modern, high-tech America. At a timewhen mainline Protestant churches are all losing membership at a rapid clip,nondenominational evangelical churches are growing by leaps and bounds, elicitinglevels of commitment and participation from their membership that no other Americaninstitution can match. Their fervor has gone mainstream.

　　There are various explanations for this success, from the skill of evangelicals inmarketing religion to the charisma of their leaders. But their success also points to ahunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue orcause. Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds—dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting,shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets—and coming to the realization thatsomething is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, theirdiversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, anarrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift themabove the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebodyout there cares about them, is listening to them—that they are not just destined to traveldown a long highway toward nothingness.

　　IF I HAVE any insight into this movement toward a deepening religious commitment,perhaps it’s because it’s a road I have traveled.

　　I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed fromKansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather had been raised bydevout Baptist grandparents after his father had gone AWOL and his mother committedsuicide, while my grandmother’s parents—who occupied a slightly higher station in thehierarchy of small-town, Great Depression society (her father worked for an oil refinery,her mother was a schoolteacher)—were practicing Methodists.

　　But for perhaps the same reasons that my grandparents would end up leaving Kansasand migrating to Hawaii, religious faith never really took root in their hearts. Mygrandmother was always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn’tsee, feel, touch, or count. My grandfather, the dreamer in our family, possessed the sortof restless soul that might have found refuge in religious belief had it not been for thoseother characteristics—an innate rebelliousness, a complete inability to discipline hisappetites, and a broad tolerance of other people’s weaknesses—that precluded him fromgetting too serious about anything.

　　This combination of traits—my grandmother’s flinty rationalism, my grandfather’sjoviality and incapacity to judge others or himself too strictly—got passed on to mymother. Her own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns inKansas, Oklahoma, and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memoriesof the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for mybenefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quartersof the world’s people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternaldamnation—and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens hadbeen created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary. Sheremembered the respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun thoseunable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed theirown dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled theirworkers out of any nickel that they could.

　　For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garbof piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

　　This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, aworking knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat onthe shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter orChristmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to theBuddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancientHawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplingsrequired no sustained commitment on my part—no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not itswellspring, just one of the many ways—and not necessarily the best way—that manattempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

　　In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that shewould become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with asuitable detachment as well. Moreover, as a child I rarely came in contact with thosewho might offer a substantially different view of faith. My father was almost entirelyabsent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was two yearsold; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met mymother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, like themumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of hisyouth.

　　When my mother remarried, it was to an Indonesian with an equally skeptical bent, aman who saw religion as not particularly useful in the practical business of makingone’s way in the world, and who had grown up in a country that easily blended itsIslamic faith with remnants of Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient animist traditions.

　　During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent firstto a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in bothcases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out themeaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer than she was with whether I wasproperly learning my multiplication tables.

　　And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the mostspiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct forkindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimesto her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she workedmightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school:

　　honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at povertyand injustice, and scorned those who were indifferent to both.

　　Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and itsprecious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. During thecourse of the day, she might come across a painting, read a line of poetry, or hear apiece of music, and I would see tears well up in her eyes. Sometimes, as I was growingup, she would wake me up in the middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularlyspectacular moon, or she would have me close my eyes as we walked together attwilight to listen to the rustle of leaves. She loved to take children—any child—and sitthem in her lap and tickle them or play games with them or examine their hands, tracingout the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be foundthere. She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.

　　It is only in retrospect, of course, that I fully understand how deeply this spirit of hersinfluenced me—how it sustained me despite the absence of a father in the house, how itbuoyed me through the rocky shoals of my adolescence, and how it invisibly guided thepath I would ultimately take. My fierce ambitions might have been fueled by myfather—by my knowledge of his achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire tosomehow earn his love, and by my resentments and anger toward him. But it was mymother’s fundamental faith—in the goodness of people and in the ultimate value of thisbrief life we’ve each been given—that channeled those ambitions. It was in search ofconfirmation of her values that I studied political philosophy, looking for both alanguage and systems of action that could help build community and make justice real.

　　And it was in search of some practical application of those values that I accepted workafter college as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago that weretrying to cope with joblessness, drugs, and hopelessness in their midst.

　　I have recorded in a previous book the ways in which my early work in Chicago helpedme grow into my manhood—how my work with the pastors and laypeople theredeepened my resolve to lead a public life, how they fortified my racial identity andconfirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Butmy experiences in Chicago also forced me to confront a dilemma that my mother neverfully resolved in her own life: the fact that I had no community or shared traditions inwhich to ground my most deeply held beliefs. The Christians with whom I workedrecognized themselves in me; they saw that I knew their Book and shared their valuesand sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, anobserver among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without anunequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned atsome level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but alsoalone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.

　　There are worse things than such freedom. My mother would live happily as a citizen ofthe world, stitching together a community of friends wherever she found herself,satisfying her need for meaning in her work and in her children. In such a life I, too,might have contented myself had it not been for the particular attributes of thehistorically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism andembrace the Christian faith.

　　For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition tospur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the wholeperson. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individualsalvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’spolitical, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate waythe biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers andprincipalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just acomfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent inthe world. In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, intheir ability to “make a way out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direstof circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.

　　And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith instruggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faithdoesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world.

　　Long before it became fashionable among television evangelists, the typical blacksermon freely acknowledged that all Christians (including the pastors) could expect tostill experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone elseexperienced. The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of arelease, an acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions. In the blackcommunity, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those whocame to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn’t, and so were aslikely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation. You needed to come tochurch precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner,saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away—because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaksand valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.

　　It was because of these newfound understandings—that religious commitment did notrequire me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic andsocial justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved—that I wasfinally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and bebaptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did notmagically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, Ifelt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself todiscovering His truth.

　　DISCUSSIONS OF FAITH are rarely heavy-handed within the confines of the Senate.

　　No one is quizzed on his or her religious affiliation; I have rarely heard God’s nameinvoked during debate on the floor. The Senate chaplain, Barry Black, is a wise andworldly man, former chief of navy chaplains, an African American who grew up in oneof the toughest neighborhoods in Baltimore and carries out his limited duties—offeringthe morning prayer, hosting voluntary Bible study sessions, providing spiritualcounseling to those who seek it—with a constant spirit of warmth and inclusiveness.

　　The Wednesday-morning prayer breakfast is entirely optional, bipartisan, andecumenical (Senator Norm Coleman, who is Jewish, is currently chief organizer on theRepublican side); those who choose to attend take turns selecting a passage fromScripture and leading group discussion. Hearing the sincerity, openness, humility, andgood humor with which even the most overtly religious senators—men like RickSantorum, Sam Brownback, or Tom Coburn—share their personal faith journeys duringthese breakfasts, one is tempted to assume that the impact of faith on politics is largelysalutary, a check on personal ambition, a ballast against the buffeting winds of today’sheadlines and political expediency.

　　Beyond the Senate’s genteel confines, though, any discussion of religion and its role inpolitics can turn a bit less civil. Take my Republican opponent in 2004, AmbassadorAlan Keyes, who deployed a novel argument for attracting voters in the waning days ofthe campaign.

　　“Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” Mr. Keyes proclaimed, “because BarackObama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to havebehaved.”

　　This wasn’t the first time that Mr. Keyes had made such pronouncements. After myoriginal Republican opponent had been forced to withdraw in the wake of someawkward disclosures from his divorce file, the Illinois Republican Party, unable to settleon a local candidate, had decided to recruit Mr. Keyes for the task. The fact that Mr.

　　Keyes hailed from Maryland, had never lived in Illinois, had never won an election, andwas regarded by many in the national Republican Party as insufferable didn’t deter theIllinois GOP leadership. One Republican colleague of mine in the state senate providedme with a blunt explanation of their strategy: “We got our own Harvard-educatedconservative black guy to go up against the Harvard-educated liberal black guy. He maynot win, but at least he can knock that halo off your head.”

　　Mr. Keyes himself was not lacking in confidence. A Ph.D. from Harvard, a protégé ofJeane Kirkpatrick, and U.S. ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council underRonald Reagan, he had burst into the public eye first as a two-time candidate for a U.S.

　　Senate seat from Maryland and then as a two-time candidate for the GOP presidentialnomination. He had been clobbered in all four races, but those losses had done nothingto diminish Mr. Keyes’s reputation in the eyes of his supporters; for them, electoralfailure seemed only to confirm his uncompromising devotion to conservative principles.

　　There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat Mr. Keyes coulddeliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, hecould wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running withsweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotion as hecalled the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil.

　　Unfortunately for him, neither his intellect nor his eloquence could overcome certaindefects as a candidate. Unlike most politicians, for example, Mr. Keyes made no effortto conceal what he clearly considered to be his moral and intellectual superiority. Withhis erect bearing, almost theatrically formal manner, and a hooded gaze that made himappear perpetually bored, he came off as a cross between a Pentecostal preacher andWilliam F. Buckley.

　　Moreover, that self-assuredness disabled in him the instincts for self-censorship thatallow most people to navigate the world without getting into constant fistfights. Mr.

　　Keyes said whatever popped into his mind, and with dogged logic would follow over acliff just about any idea that came to him. Already disadvantaged by a late start, a lackof funds, and his status as a carpetbagger, he proceeded during the course of a merethree months to offend just about everybody. He labeled all homosexuals—includingDick Cheney’s daughter—“selfish hedonists,” and insisted that adoption by gay couplesinevitably resulted in incest. He called the Illinois press corps a tool of the “anti-marriage, anti-life agenda.” He accused me of taking a “slaveholder’s position” in mydefense of abortion rights and called me a “hard-core, academic Marxist” for mysupport of universal health care and other social programs—and then added for goodmeasure that because I was not the descendant of slaves I was not really AfricanAmerican. At one point he even managed to alienate the conservative Republicans whorecruited him to Illinois by recommending—perhaps in a play for black votes—reparations in the form of a complete abolition of the income tax for all blacks withslave ancestry. (“This is a disaster!” sputtered one comment posted on the discussionboard of Illinois’s hard-right website, the Illinois Leader. “WHAT ABOUT THEWHITE GUYS!!!”)In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouthshut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed,I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our pathscrossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge toeither taunt him or wring his neck. Once, when we bumped into each other at an IndianIndependence Day parade, I poked him in the chest while making a point, a bit of alpha-male behavior that I hadn’t engaged in since high school and which an observant newscrew gamely captured; the moment was replayed in slow motion on TV that evening. Inthe three debates that were held before the election, I was frequently tongue-tied,irritable, and uncharacteristically tense—a fact that the public (having by that pointwritten Mr. Keyes off) largely missed, but one that caused no small bit of distress tosome of my supporters. “Why are you letting this guy give you fits?” they would askme. For them, Mr. Keyes was a kook, an extremist, his arguments not even worthentertaining.

　　What they didn’t understand was that I could not help but take Mr. Keyes seriously. Forhe claimed to speak for my religion—and although I might not like what came out ofhis mouth, I had to admit that some of his views had many adherents within theChristian church.

　　His argument went something like this: America was founded on the twin principles ofGod-given liberty and Christian faith. Successive liberal administrations had hijackedthe federal government to serve a godless materialism and had thereby steadily chippedaway—through regulation, socialistic welfare programs, gun laws, compulsoryattendance at public schools, and the income tax (“the slave tax,” as Mr. Keyes calledit)—at individual liberty and traditional values. Liberal judges had further contributed tothis moral decay by perverting the First Amendment to mean the separation of churchand state, and by validating all sorts of aberrant behavior—particularly abortion andhomosexuality—that threatened to destroy the nuclear family. The answer to Americanrenewal, then, was simple: Restore religion generally—and Christianity in particular—to its rightful place at the center of our public and private lives, align the law withreligious precepts, and drastically restrict the power of federal government to legislatein areas prescribed neither by the Constitution nor by God’s commandments.

　　In other words, Alan Keyes presented the essential vision of the religious right in thiscountry, shorn of all caveat, compromise, or apology. Within its own terms, it wasentirely coherent, and provided Mr. Keyes with the certainty and fluency of an OldTestament prophet. And while I found it simple enough to dispose of his constitutionaland policy arguments, his readings of Scripture put me on the defensive.

　　Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, Mr. Keyes would say, and yet he supports a lifestylethat the Bible calls an abomination.

　　Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, but he supports the destruction of innocent and sacredlife.

　　What could I say? That a literal reading of the Bible was folly? That Mr. Keyes, aRoman Catholic, should disregard the Pope’s teachings? Unwilling to go there, Ianswered with the usual liberal response in such debates—that we live in a pluralisticsociety, that I can’t impose my religious views on another, that I was running to be aU.S. senator from Illinois and not the minister of Illinois. But even as I answered, I wasmindful of Mr. Keyes’s implicit accusation—that I remained steeped in doubt, that myfaith was adulterated, that I was not a true Christian.

　　IN A SENSE, my dilemma with Mr. Keyes mirrors the broader dilemma that liberalismhas faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us to be tolerant of otherpeople’s religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs don’t cause anyone harm or impingeon another’s right to believe differently. To the extent that religious communities arecontent to keep to themselves and faith is neatly confined as a matter of individualconscience, such tolerance is not tested.

　　But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very publicaffair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize whereverthey can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend theirbeliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.

　　And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve these aims,liberals get nervous. Those of us in public office may try to avoid the conversationabout religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that—regardless of our personal beliefs—constitutional principles tie our hands on issues likeabortion or school prayer. (Catholic politicians of a certain generation seem particularlycautious, perhaps because they came of age when large segments of America stillquestioned whether John F. Kennedy would end up taking orders from the Pope.) Someon the left (although not those in public office) go further, dismissing religion in thepublic square as inherently irrational, intolerant, and therefore dangerous—and notingthat, with its emphasis on personal salvation and the policing of private morality,religious talk has given conservatives cover to ignore questions of public morality, likepoverty or corporate malfeasance.

　　Such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when the opponent is AlanKeyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledgethe power of faith in the lives of the American people, and so avoid joining a seriousdebate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

　　To begin with, it’s bad politics. There are a whole lot of religious people in America,including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religiousdiscourse—when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian orMuslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how itshould not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about ourobligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religiousbroadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome—others will fill the vacuum.

　　And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or whocynically use religion to justify partisan ends.

　　More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religiosityhas often inhibited us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of theproblem is rhetorical: Scrub language of all religious content and we forfeit the imageryand terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personalmorality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address withoutreference to “the judgments of the Lord,” or King’s “I Have a Dream” speech withoutreference to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspirewhat had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. Ofcourse organized religion doesn’t have a monopoly on virtue, and one not need bereligious to make moral claims or appeal to a common good. But we should not avoidmaking such claims or appeals—or abandon any reference to our rich religioustraditions—in order to avoid giving offense.

　　Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not justrhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the rolethat values and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems.

　　After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, arenot simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten-point plan. They are alsorooted in societal indifference and individual callousness—the desire among those at thetop of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost, as well asthe despair and self-destructiveness among those at the bottom of the social ladder.

　　Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also requirechanges in hearts and minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and thatour leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby. But I also believethat when a gangbanger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feelssomebody disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do we need topunish that man for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there’s a hole in hisheart, one that government programs alone may not be able to repair. I believe invigorous enforcement of our nondiscrimination laws; I also believe that atransformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of thenation’s CEOs could bring quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. I think we shouldput more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys, and give them theinformation about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortionrates, and help ensure that every child is loved and cherished. But I also think faith canfortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and thesense of reverence all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

　　I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology orthat we abandon the fight for institutional change in favor of “a thousand points oflight.” I recognize how often appeals to private virtue become excuses for inaction.

　　Moreover, nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith—such asthe politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps (offrhythm) to the gospel choir or sprinkles in a few biblical citations to spice up athoroughly dry policy speech.

　　I am suggesting that if we progressives shed some of our own biases, we mightrecognize the values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to themoral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call tosacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and notjust “I,” resonates in religious congregations across the country. We need to take faithseriously not simply to block the religious right but to engage all persons of faith in thelarger project of American renewal.

　　Some of this is already beginning to happen. Megachurch pastors like Rick Warren andT. D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influence to confront AIDS, Third World debtrelief, and the genocide in Darfur. Self-described “progressive evangelicals” like JimWallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the biblical injunction to help the poor as ameans of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growinginequality. And across the country, individual churches like my own are sponsoringday-care programs, building senior centers, and helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives.

　　But to build on these still tentative partnerships between the religious and secularworlds, more work will need to be done. The tensions and suspicions on each side of thereligious divide will have to be squarely addressed, and each side will need to acceptsome ground rules for collaboration.

　　The first and most difficult step for some evangelical Christians is to acknowledge thecritical role that the establishment clause has played not only in the development of ourdemocracy but also in the robustness of our religious practice. Contrary to the claims ofmany on the Christian right who rail against the separation of church and state, theirargument is not with a handful of liberal sixties judges. It is with the drafters of the Billof Rights and the forebears of today’s evangelical church.

　　Many of the leading lights of the Revolution, most notably Franklin and Jefferson, weredeists who—while believing in an Almighty God—questioned not only the dogmas ofthe Christian church but the central tenets of Christianity itself (including Christ’sdivinity). Jefferson and Madison in particular argued for what Jefferson called a “wallof separation” between church and state, as a means of protecting individual liberty inreligious belief and practice, guarding the state against sectarian strife, and defendingorganized religion against the state’s encroachment or undue influence.

　　Of course, not all the Founding Fathers agreed; men like Patrick Henry and John Adamsforwarded a variety of proposals to use the arm of the state to promote religion. Butwhile it was Jefferson and Madison who pushed through the Virginia statute of religiousfreedom that would become the model for the First Amendment’s religion clauses, itwasn’t these students of the Enlightenment who proved to be the most effectivechampions of a separation between church and state.

　　Rather, it was Baptists like Reverend John Leland and other evangelicals who providedthe popular support needed to get these provisions ratified. They did so because theywere outsiders; because their style of exuberant worship appealed to the lower classes;because their evangelization of all comers—including slaves—threatened theestablished order; because they were no respecters of rank and privilege; and becausethey were consistently persecuted and disdained by the dominant Anglican Church inthe South and the Congregationalist orders of the North. Not only did they rightly fearthat any state-sponsored religion might encroach on their ability, as religious minorities,to practice their faith; they also believed that religious vitality inevitably withers whencompelled or supported by the state. In the words of the Reverend Leland, “It is erroralone, that stands in need of government to support it; truth can and will do betterwithout…it.”

　　Jefferson and Leland’s formula for religious freedom worked. Not only has Americaavoided the sorts of religious strife that continue to plague the globe, but religiousinstitutions have continued to thrive—a phenomenon that some observers attributedirectly to the absence of a state-sponsored church, and hence a premium on religiousexperimentation and volunteerism. Moreover, given the increasing diversity ofAmerica’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whateverwe once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, aMuslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

　　But let’s even assume that we only had Christians within our borders. WhoseChristianity would we teach in the schools? James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s? Whichpassages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus,which suggests that slavery is all right and eating shellfish is an abomination? Howabout Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Orshould we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount—a passage so radical that it’s doubtfulthat our Defense Department would survive its application?

　　This brings us to a different point—the manner in which religious views should informpublic debate and guide elected officials. Surely, secularists are wrong when they askbelievers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; FrederickDouglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin LutherKing, Jr.—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—not only weremotivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To saythat men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public-policydebates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, muchof it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

　　What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiouslymotivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. Itrequires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If Iam opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning thepractice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will andexpect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have toexplain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths,including those with no faith at all.

　　For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rulesof engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular andmaterial worlds over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have nochoice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involvedifferent paths to discerning truth. Reason—and science—involves the accumulation ofknowledge based on realities that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is basedon truths that are not provable through ordinary human understanding—the “belief inthings not seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligentdesign out of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific knowledge issuperior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that each path to knowledgeinvolves different rules and that those rules are not interchangeable.

　　Politics is hardly a science, and it too infrequently depends on reason. But in apluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like science, depends on ourability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover,politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible. At somefundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible.

　　If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless ofthe consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may besublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

　　The story of Abraham and Isaac offers a simple but powerful example. According to theBible, Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his “only son, Isaac, whom you love,” asa burnt offering. Without argument, Abraham takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds himto an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

　　Of course, we know the happy ending—God sends down an angel to intercede at thevery last minute. Abraham has passed God’s test of devotion. He becomes a model offidelity to God, and his great faith is rewarded through future generations. And yet it isfair to say that if any of us saw a twenty-first-century Abraham raising the knife on theroof of his apartment building, we would call the police; we would wrestle him down;even if we saw him lower the knife at the last minute, we would expect the Departmentof Children and Family Services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with childabuse. We would do so because God doesn’t reveal Himself or His angels to all of us ina single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees,true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with thosethings that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we knowto be true—as individuals or communities of faith—will be true for us alone.

　　Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some senseof proportion. This is not entirely foreign to religious doctrine; even those who claimthe Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, based on a sense thatsome passages—the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity—arecentral to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modifiedto accommodate modern life. The American people intuitively understand this, which iswhy the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gaymarriage nevertheless are opposed to a constitutional amendment banning it. Religiousleadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they shouldrecognize this wisdom in their politics.

　　If a sense of proportion should guide Christian activism, then it must also guide thosewho police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God inpublic is a breach in the wall of separation; as the Supreme Court has properlyrecognized, context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiancefeel oppressed as a consequence of muttering the phrase “under God”; I didn’t.

　　Allowing the use of school property for meetings by voluntary student prayer groupsshould not be a threat, any more than its use by the high school Republican Club shouldthreaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problemsand hence merit carefully tailored support.

　　THESE BROAD PRINCIPLES for discussing faith within a democracy are not all-inclusive. It would be helpful, for example, if in debates about matters touching onreligion—as in all of democratic discourse—we could resist the temptation to imputebad faith to those who disagree with us. In judging the persuasiveness of various moralclaims, we should be on the lookout for inconsistency in how such claims are applied:

　　As a general rule, I am more prone to listen to those who are as outraged by theindecency of homelessness as they are by the indecency of music videos. And we needto recognize that sometimes our argument is less about what is right than about whomakes the final determination—whether we need the coercive arm of the state toenforce our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience andevolving norms.

　　Of course, even steadfast application of these principles won’t resolve every conflict.

　　The willingness of many who oppose abortion to make an exception for rape and incestindicates a willingness to bend principle for the sake of practical considerations; thewillingness of even the most ardent prochoice advocates to accept some restrictions onlate-term abortion marks a recognition that a fetus is more than a body part and thatsociety has some interest in its development. Still, between those who believe that lifebegins at conception and those who consider the fetus an extension of the woman’sbody until birth, a point is rapidly reached at which compromise is not possible. At thatpoint, the best we can do is ensure that persuasion rather than violence or intimidationdetermines the political outcome—and that we refocus at least some of our energies onreducing the number of unwanted pregnancies through education (including aboutabstinence), contraception, adoption, or any other strategies that have broad support andhave been proven to work.

　　For many practicing Christians, the same inability to compromise may apply to gaymarriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christianmen and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faithwithout civil penalty. All too often I have sat in a church and heard a pastor use gaybashing as a cheap parlor trick—“It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” he willshout, usually when the sermon is not going so well. I believe that American society canchoose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit ofchild rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state denyAmerican citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters ashospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love areof the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers anobscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on theMount.

　　Perhaps I am sensitive on this issue because I have seen the pain my own carelessnesshas caused. Before my election, in the middle of my debates with Mr. Keyes, I receiveda phone message from one of my strongest supporters. She was a small-business owner,a mother, and a thoughtful, generous person. She was also a lesbian who had lived in amonogamous relationship with her partner for the last decade.

　　She knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex marriage,and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful consensus, theheightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures toprevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. Her phone message in this instancehad been prompted by a radio interview she had heard in which I had referenced myreligious traditions in explaining my position on the issue. She told me that she hadbeen hurt by my remarks; she felt that by bringing religion into the equation, I wassuggesting that she, and others like her, were somehow bad people.

　　I felt bad, and told her so in a return call. As I spoke to her I was reminded that nomatter how much Christians who oppose homosexuality may claim that they hate thesin but love the sinner, such a judgment inflicts pain on good people—people who aremade in the image of God, and who are often truer to Christ’s message than those whocondemn them. And I was reminded that it is my obligation, not only as an electedofficial in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibilitythat my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claiminfallibility in my support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infectedwith society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus’ callto love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I maybe seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I don’t believe such doubtsmake me a bad Christian. I believe they make me human, limited in my understandingsof God’s purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with thebelief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually opento new revelations—whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed toabortion.

　　THIS IS NOT to say that I’m unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I’mabsolutely sure about—the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, thevalue of love and charity, humility and grace.

　　Those beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham,Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city’s Civil Rights Institute. The institute is rightacross the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where, in 1963, fouryoung children—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and DeniseMcNair—lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded duringSunday school, and before my talk I took the opportunity to visit the church. The youngpastor and several deacons greeted me at the door and showed me the still-visible scaralong the wall where the bomb went off. I saw the clock at the back of the church, stillfrozen at 10:22 a.m. I studied the portraits of the four little girls.

　　After the tour, the pastor, deacons, and I held hands and said a prayer in the sanctuary.

　　Then they left me to sit in one of the pews and gather my thoughts. What must it havebeen like for those parents forty years ago, I wondered, knowing that their preciousdaughters had been snatched away by violence at once so casual and so vicious? Howcould they endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behindtheir children’s murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss?

　　Those parents would have seen the mourners pour in from all across the nation, wouldhave read the condolences from across the globe, would have watched as LyndonJohnson announced on national television that the time had come to overcome, wouldhave seen Congress finally pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Friends and strangersalike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain—that they hadawakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb hadburst a dam to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

　　And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you frommadness and eternal rage—unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a betterplace?

　　My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread throughher body and it was clear that there was no coming back. She had admitted to me duringthe course of her illness that she was not ready to die; the suddenness of it all had takenher by surprise, as if the physical world she loved so much had turned on her, betrayedher. And although she fought valiantly, endured the pain and chemotherapy with graceand good humor to the very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. Morethan fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death thatfrightened her, I think—the notion that on this final journey, on this last adventure, shewould have no one to fully share her experiences with, no one who could marvel withher at the body’s capacity to inflict pain on itself, or laugh at the stark absurdity of lifeonce one’s hair starts falling out and one’s salivary glands shut down.

　　I carried such thoughts with me as I left the church and made my speech. Later thatnight, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as theylaughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them upthe stairs and to their baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my twogirls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another,that desire to snatch up each moment of your child’s presence and never let go—topreserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel oftheir fingers clasped around yours. I thought of Sasha asking me once what happenedwhen we die—“I don’t want to die, Daddy,” she had added matter-of-factly—and I hadhugged her and said, “You’ve got a long, long way before you have to worry aboutthat,” which had seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her thetruth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of wherethe soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, Iknew what I hoped for—that my mother was together in some way with those four littlegirls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits.

　　I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven.