Obama supporters hope that his comfort in talking publicly about his religious beliefs will both help Obama bridge some of the cultural gap that separates him from large chunks of the electorate and help him make inroads into the evangelical vote. This strategy suffered a huge blow with the Revered Wright affair which tied Obama’s faith up with a divisive, racialist world view; the new Newsweek poll shows that almost a third of voters state that Wright might stop them from supporting Obama. However, the Obama campaign clearly believes that talking about religion is still sensible politics. In this week’s Newsweek, Obama talks about how often he prays, his Bible reading habits and what he tells his children about faith.
One of the pluses for Obama in talking about his personal faith is that the subject encourages reporters to go a little easy. Newsweek calls Obama’s spiritual journey a “uniquely American tale” and write that “He found Christ—but that hasn’t stopped him from asking questions.” The positive—almost hagiographic—tone of the piece is summed up by this sentence: “Always drawn to life’s Big Questions, Obama embarked on a spiritual quest in which he tried to reconcile his rational side with his yearning for transcendence.”
We can expect Obama to talk about faith a lot more over the summer as he tries to introduce himself to voters. If all the coverage is like this, the Obama campaign will be very happy.
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