Obama's Spirtuality

Obama has spoken frequently about the importance of his Christian faith. In his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," he wrote that "the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world. ... You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it."

Despite those words, Obama has attended church sparingly in the past several months. Since winning the election, he has spent Sunday mornings at the gym. Many Washington-area churches hope that will change after he is inaugurated.

At Metropolitan AME Church, a historic, predominantly black congregation six blocks from the White House, senior pastor Ronald Braxton says parishioners have been buzzing about the possibility that the incoming president, his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, — 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha — might attend services with them.

Braxton said it would be good if Obama resumed worshipping at a congregation rooted in the black community.

"He's familiar with African-American worship traditions," Braxton said, referring to Obama's membership at Wright's church in Chicago. "Metropolitan AME would be a wise a choice and a safe haven in which to worship."

Metropolitan AME has about 2,000 members, including former Clinton administration insider Vernon Jordan and former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, Braxton said. The church has a long history as well — Frederick Douglass worshipped and was eulogized there. Bill Clinton attended inaugural prayer services there in 1993 and 1997.

Braxton said the AME denominational leadership is interested in where the Obamas will worship, and is developing plans to extend a formal invitation.

Church member Michael Horton said the congregation could provide the Obamas a base of moral support.

"Our current congregation is full of 'agents-for-change,'" he said, playing on one of Obama's campaign themes. "I believe there is no better place for the Obamas to worship and feel comfortable."  more

Barack Obama's religion: Intellectual search of faith

 In 1981 Barack Obama was 20 years old, a Columbia University student in search of the meaning of life. He was torn a million different ways: between youth and maturity, black and white, coasts and continents, wonder and tragedy. He enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school in Hawaii and had just spent two years "enjoying myself," as he puts it, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In New York City, "I lived an ascetic existence," Obama told NEWSWEEK in an interview on his campaign plane last week. "I did a lot of spiritual exploration. I withdrew from the world in a fairly deliberate way." He fasted. Often, he'd go days without speaking to another person.


For company, he had books. There was Saint Augustine, the fourth-century North African bishop who wrote the West's first spiritual memoir and built the theological foundations of the Christian Church. There was Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher and father of existentialism. There was Graham Greene, the Roman Catholic Englishman whose short novels are full of compromise, ambivalence and pain. Obama meditated on these men and argued with them in his mind.   

more from  Lisa Miller and Richard Wolffe | NEWSWEEK

Published Jul 12, 2008

From the magazine issue dated Jul 21, 2008