Stationed in the King's Court: Evangelicals in the Age of Obama

Abstract

This article examines the relationship of Barack Obama and an emerging generation of evangelical leaders. It argues that his 2008 presidential campaign courted centrist evangelicals by rendering the Religious Right as extreme and “out of touch” with the American mainstream while framing his longtime pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as a coinciding extreme voice on the left. To be sure, evangelical centrists typify a longstanding religious tradition of response known as intermediation that has often had access to presidential power. Unfortunately, this strategy of religious triangulation that isolates the “extreme” Right and Left deprives the administration of the moral resources from the Left that could catalyze a robust progressive agenda.

Keywords:

• black Protestantism
• evangelicals
• Jeremiah Wright
• prophet as intermediary
• Religious Right

Notes

David Lavin Paul Attewell, Thurston Domina, and Tania Levey, “The Black Middle Class: Progress, Prospects, and Puzzles,” Journal of African American Studies 8, no. 1 (2004): 24.

Michael A. Fletcher, “Fifty Years after March on Washington, Economic Gap between Blacks, Whites Persist,” Washington Post, August 27, 2013, 24; Brad Plumer, “These Ten Charts Show the Black-White Economic Gap Hasn't Budged in 50 Years,” The Washington Post, August 28 2013.

Randall Kennedy, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 12.

In 2008, Obama received 53% of the total religious vote to McCain's 46%. This total vote was split evenly at 48% in the 2000 election, and John Kerry received 48% over against Bush's 51% in 2004. When one looks at particular demographic breakdowns, the numbers further reveal that Barack Obama made strides with particular religious groups. For instance, Obama received 26% of white, born-again evangelical voters where John Kerry only received 21% of this vote four years earlier. The percentage point increase is similar among Catholics, with a marked difference among Hispanic Catholics who tend to lean more toward the evangelical spectrum. Barack Obama's support here jumped up 7 percentage points to 72% from the previous 65% of support given to both Gore and Kerry in previous elections. Pew Research Religion & Public Life Project, “How the Faithful Voted: 2012 Preliminary Analysis,” Polling and Analysis (2012).

See Jacquelyn Grant, Perspectives on Womanist Theology, Black Church Scholars Series 7 (Atlanta: ITC Press, 1995); see James H. Cone, Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999); see Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).

Bill Moyer, “Interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright,” in Bill Moyers Journal (PBS, 2008), 12.

Ibid.

John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity (1630),” in The American Intellectual Tradition, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 14–15.

David Walker and Sean Wilentz, David Walker's Appeal: In Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 71.

Ibid., 70.

For a more detailed analysis of this “enduring black jeremiad” in American history see, David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

As quoted in Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 11.

See chapter six, “The Eclipse of a Black Public and the Challenge of a Post-Soul Politics” in Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Here I am borrowing from Robert Wilson's contemporary classic text, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980).

Wallace Best, “‘The Right Achieved and the Wrong Way Conquered': J.H. Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Conflict over Civil Rights,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 16, no. 2 (2006), 195–226.

Ibid.

Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 65.

Michael Paulson, “Obama's Man of Faith,” Boston Globe, July 10 2008.

FDCH E-Media, “Transcript: Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama,” The Washington Post, July 27 2004.

For a more thorough treatment of Christian Reconstructionism and its impact on African American evangelicals, see my own article, “Onward, Christian Soldiers! Race, Religion, and Nationalism in Post Civil Rights America,” in Ethics That Matters: African, Carribean, and African American Sources, ed. Marcia Y. Riggs and James Samuel Logan (Minneanapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).

Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), 10.

Julie Ingersoll, “Mobilizing Evangelicals: Christian Reconstructionism and the Roots of the Religious Right,” in Evangelicals and Demcoracy in America, ed. Steven Brint and Jean Reith (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), 180.

Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 6–7.

One might say that this was probably the most effective strategy of the late Jerry Falwell. According to anthropologist Susan Friend Harding, Falwell brokered a deal between separatist fundamentalists and politically active evangelicals. They agreed that they were all “bible-believing evangelicals.” These leaders took their ideological and institutional cues from the Reconstructionist writings of Rushdoony, Gary North, and Rus Walton. Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28; Julie Ingersoll, “Mobilizing Evangelicals: Christian Reconstructionism and the Roots of the Religious Right,” in Evangelicals and Democracy in America, ed. Steven Brint and Jean Reith Schroedel (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009).

http://nhclc.org/about/mission.html.

David P. Gushee, The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008), 103.

Joel Hunter, A New Kind of Conservative (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2008), 5.

Paulson, “Obama's Man of Faith.”

The National Baptist Convention, The National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Convention, The African American Episcopal Church, the AME Zion, the CME, and the Church of God in Christ.

Gaston Espinosa, “The Pentecostalization of Latin American and U.S. Latino Christianity,” PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 25, no. 2 (2004), 262–292.

The Bebbington Quadrilateral [David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989)] has become the standard accepted definition in the field of evangelical studies. It involves conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism.

The nine-point criteria includes: a personal commitment to Jesus, belief one will go to heaven due to confession of sins and profession of Jesus, faith is very important, responsibility of evangelism, belief in Satan, salvation only available through grace not good works, Jesus was sinless, biblical innerancy, and that God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. The Barna Group, Ltd., “Survey Explores Who Qualifies As an Evangelical,” accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/13-culture/111-survey-explores-who-qualifies-as-an-evangelical#.U7WhexyOJmz

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Richer Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

"Full Transcript: Obama's 2014 State of the Union Address,” The Washington Post, January 28, 2014.

Jim Kuhnehenn, “Obama's Economic Message Emphasizes ‘Opportunity,’ Downplays Politically Charged ‘Inequality’,” Associated Press, January 24, 2014.

Gary Dorrien, The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New York; Toronto; Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 230.

E.J. Dionne Jr., William A. Galston, Korin Davis, and Ross Tilchin, “Faith in Equality: Economic Justice and the Future of Religious Progressives,” in Governance Studies (Brookings Institute, 2014), 9.

David E. Campbell and Robert Putnam, “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics Is Bad for Both,” Foreign Affairs, no. March/April (2012).

Ibid.

E.J. Dionne Jr. et al., “Faith in Equality,” 26–29.

Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham City Jail (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1963).