Religious background of candidates shared

Published Friday, October 3, 2008

I've heard people say that Fergus Falls has the highest number of churches per capita in our country. Although I can't say if that is fact, I know that we are a religious community.

Because of that, I understand that residents are interested in the religious background of the candidates running for president. I would just like to set the record straight, in that I've heard about many apparent mistruths that seem to be circulating around the internet about Barack Obama.

In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama devotes a whole chapter to faith and discusses the etiology of his own Christian faith. He writes, “I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather had been raised by devout Baptist grandparents ... while my grandmother's parents ... were practicing Methodists. But for perhaps the same reasons that my grandparents would end up leaving Kansas and migrating to Hawaii, religious faith never really took roots in their hearts.”

Obama never lived with his biological father (who was Muslim) and really only met him two times in his life.

Of his mother, he writes that organized religion “too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness ... When my mother remarried, it was to an Indonesian with an equally skeptical bent.”

It was during these years in Indonesia, when he was in elementary school, that he attended both a Catholic school and then a Muslim school. He reports that his mother was much more concerned with whether he learned his multiplication tables than with the religious teachings.

His own conversion was born out of his community organizing years, in which he chose to take his Harvard law degree and use his skills to assist the poor and working poor in black communities in Chicago.

Of this time in his life, he writes, ”In the black community, the line between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn't, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation.

You needed to come to church 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 peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.

“It was because of these newfound understandings that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved — that I was finally able to walk down the isle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

My hope is that this will offer up a clearer picture of Obama and my prayer for all of you is for clear discernment in this election season no matter on which side of the isle you sit.

Beth Monke- Fergus Falls