Beyond School

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs

Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common:

He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car with a rust-hole in the passenger side through which Michelle could see the sidewalk, but he didn’t seem to care: it got him from Point A to B. I had a ‘66 VW Bus in the late ’80s with rust-holes too, and loved it as much as the ‘68 Plymouth Valiant and ‘66 Mercedes 220S I drove in the ’90s. (I especially loved the Mercedes because I found it covered in moss under a tree, where it had sat for years, and bought it for USD $700. I washed it, pulled its engine, learned auto mechanics by rebuilding it [call it a reaction to too much book-learning and not enough manual skills], dropped it back in, and drove it cross-country from Oregon to Tennessee the summer before I entered Boot Camp and the US Army.)

He studied philosophy, religion, politics, history, literature in college. He was seeking wisdom. That’s what I did too. I took my sweet time getting my college coupon – my Bachelor’s Degree – because I wasn’t in college to get out of it, but to get as much out of it as I could. So I took 16 years between my freshman year and my graduation date, studying whatever looked interesting in each semester’s catalogue, and dropping out altogether when I needed a break, or wanted to study more deeply than college permitted. The best drop-out year came after a philosophy class in which we read only a few chapters of Nietzsche. I dropped out to read all 16 or so of his complete works, plus a few biographies and scholarly studies. That took about a year. Then I went back to college for more. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the same way, describing himself as a “college drop-in.” Obama read the Bible, read Nietzsche, and more, as a young adult. So did I.

Obama smoked, read, and wrote. So did I. I hope his writings were better than mine, but that’s not the point. The point is all of that reading and writing (the smoking was a fix to stay seated, awake, and focused) were self-compelled manifestations of a desire to make sense of life, history, and the world. Others were frying their brain cells in frat-house keg parties and sailing through classes they hoped would make them rich. I know that sounds self-righteous, but there it is. At 46 years old, I am thankful for all of that seeking. It has paid off in a daily happiness I never would have had otherwise. And when I compare myself to the rich parents of my students, who seem to have chosen those get-rich college classes and succeeded in reaching their goals – but at the expense of having a reading, writing, and culture life at all – I become even more thankful. They have more money than me, but they also seem poorer. I wouldn’t trade places.

Finally – the wrong word, since I suspect I’ll be fascinated by this man for the rest of my life, and will never delete the Google News “Obama” feed in my RSS Reader until Life deletes me – Obama says, in the interview below, that his life-long quest for values he felt right to live by (call it his “quest for God,” if you will) did not reach solid ground until he reached his fortieth year. Same here, roughly, though my years teaching Asian history in Shanghai threw some Buddha and Tao headily into my own mix, and very influentially, when I was 42 or so.

But the point is this: We talk, in our edu-lingo, about the importance of constructing meaning from our studies, not just swallowing and regurgitating received information.  What I love about the interview below is the same thing I (humbly) love about my own path: It shows an understanding of questions about God, the Sacred, and the Good and Right that are eminently constructed. This interview is an example of critical thinking about traditional religion at its best. And while I don’t share Obama’s views about many things below, I do admire that he seems to have gone through the hard work of reflecting his way to those views, instead of just believing the things he was taught by parents, preachers, and all teachers of old dogmas in his life.

Put another way, the interview below is an example of that other (rightfully) sacred cow of modern education, project-based learning – with a vengeance. Because the project was a life-long one, and so authentic it had nothing to do with assignments and grades – nothing to do with school at all. It had everything to do with authentic learning for its own sake, learning for the highest purpose of all: a life of wisdom. And if that sounds high-flown to you, it does to me too, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The guy just made history, after all, by becoming the first mixed-race president of the still very racist United States. If that doesn’t suggest a wisdom, I don’t know what does.

Before I tell you to “enjoy,” note the format of the below: the hollow bullets are snippets from the interview; the square indented bullets are my occasional annotations.

Now: “Enjoy.” We’ve got a life-long learner as our next president. Happy days are here again.

• Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani – Steven Waldman – Annotated

  Full transcript of a 2004 interview Obama gave to a religion columnist about his religious beliefs.

• tags: obama, religion, christianity, politics, elections08

  • part of my project in life was probably to spend the first 40 years of my life figuring out what I did believe – I’m 42 now – and it’s not that I had it all completely worked out, but I’m spending a lot of time now trying to apply what I believe and trying to live up to those values.
  • My grandparents who were from small towns in Kansas. My grandmother was Methodist. My grandfather was Baptist. This was at a time when I think the Methodists felt slightly superior to the Baptists. And by the time I was born, they were, I think, my grandparents had joined a Universalist church.
  • • Universal/Unitarian is my favorite denomination. – post by cburell

    [Read the rest below the fold....]

  • So I don’t think as a child we were, or I had a structured religious education. But my mother was deeply spiritual person, and would spend a lot of time talking about values and give me books about the world’s religions, and talk to me about them. And I think always, her view always was that underlying these religions were a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself but also for the greater good.

  • I probably didn’t get started getting active in church activities until I moved to Chicago.

    The way I came to Chicago in 1985 was that I was interested in community organizing and I was inspired by the Civil Rights movement. And the idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. And there was a group of churches out on the South Side of Chicago that had come together to form an organization to try to deal with the devastation of steel plants that had closed. And didn’t have much money, but felt that if they formed an organization and hired somebody to organize them to work on issues that affected their community, that it would strengthen the church and also strengthen the community.

    So they hired me, for $13,000 a year. The princely sum. And I drove out here and I didn’t know anybody and started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job training programs, or afterschool programs for youth, or making sure that city services were fairly allocated to underserved communites.

    This would be in Roseland, West Pullman, Altgeld Gardens, far South Side working class and lower income communities.

  • And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual view of religion deepened because I’d be spending an enormous amount of time with church ladies, sort of surrogate mothers and fathers and everybody I was working with was 50 or 55 or 60, and here I was a 23-year-old kid running around.

    I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church and it’s importance in the community.

    And the power of that culture to give people strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply.

    So that, one of the churches I met, or one of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ. And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.

    • Church as an activist organization. I can see that. More selfless than selfish, get-me-to-heaven church-going. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    So you got yourself born again?

    OBAMA:
    Yeah, although I don’t, I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up a suspicion of dogma. And I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.

    • He seems to find the “born again” label distasteful. – post by cburell

  • I’m a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it’s best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

    I think that, particularly as somebody who’s now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there’s an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

    • Right on. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Do you pray often?

    OBAMA:
    Uh, yeah, I guess I do.

    Its’ not formal, me getting on my knees. I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. I think throughout the day, I’m constantly asking myself questions about what I’m doing, why am I doing it.

    One of the interesting things about being in public life is there are constantly these pressures being placed on you from different sides. To be effective, you have to be able to listen to a variety of points of view, synthesize viewpoints. You also have to know when to be just a strong advocate, and push back against certain people or views that you think aren’t right or don’t serve your constituents.

    And so, the biggest challenge, I think, is always maintaining your moral compass. Those are the conversations I’m having internally. I’m measuring my actions against that inner voice that for me at least is audible, is active, it tells me where I think I’m on track and where I think I’m off track.

    It’s interesting particularly now after this election, comes with it a lot of celebrity. And I always think of politics as having two sides. There’s a vanity aspect to politics, and then there’s a substantive part of politics. Now you need some sizzle with the steak to be effective, but I think it’s easy to get swept up in the vanity side of it, the desire to be liked and recognized and important. It’s important for me throughout the day to measure and to take stock and to say, now, am I doing this because I think it’s advantageous to me politically, or because I think it’s the right thing to do? Am I doing this to get my name in the papers or am I doing this because it’s necessary to accomplish my motives.

    • Commendable candor and perceptiveness. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Checking for altruism?

    OBAMA:
    Yeah. I mean, something like it.

    Looking for, … It’s interesting, the most powerful political moments for me come when I feel like my actions are aligned with a certain truth. I can feel it. When I’m talking to a group and I’m saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I’m just being glib or clever.

    FALSANI:
    What’s that power? Is it the holy spirit? God?

    OBAMA:
    Well, I think it’s the power of the recognition of God, or the recognition of a larger truth that is being shared between me and an audience.

    That’s something you learn watching ministers, quite a bit. What they call the Holy Spirit. They want the Holy Spirit to come down before they’re preaching, right? Not to try to intellectualize it but what I see is there are moments that happen within a sermon where the minister gets out of his ego and is speaking from a deeper source. And it’s powerful.

    There are also times when you can see the ego getting in the way. Where the minister is performing and clearly straining for applause or an Amen. And those are distinct moments. I think those former moments are sacred.

    • He uses the word “God” to describe a state of honesty and compassion, it seems to me, not a super-hero in the sky. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Who’s Jesus to you?

    (He laughs nervously)

    OBAMA:
    Right.

    Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

    And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

    FALSANI:
    Is Jesus someone who you feel you have a regular connection with now, a personal connection with in your life?

    OBAMA:
    Yeah. Yes. I think some of the things I talked about earlier are addressed through, are channeled through my Christian faith and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

    FALSANI:
    Have you read the bible?

    OBAMA:
    Absolutely.

    I read it not as regularly as I would like. These days I don’t have much time for reading or reflection, period.

    FALSANI:
    Do you try to take some time for whatever, meditation prayer reading?

    OBAMA:
    I’ll be honest with you, I used to all the time, in a fairly disciplined way. But during the course of this campaign, I don’t. And I probably need to and would like to, but that’s where that internal monologue, or dialogue I think supplants my opportunity to read and reflect in a structured way these days.

    It’s much more sort of as I’m going through the day trying to take stock and take a moment here and a moment there to take stock, why am I here, how does this connect with a larger sense of purpose.

    • He doesn’t say he believes Jesus is God, when he easily could have. So he doesn’t seem to be a Johanist. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Jack Ryan [Obama's Republican opponent in the U.S. Senate race at the time] said talking about your faith is frought with peril for a public figure.

    OBAMA:
    Which is why you generally will not see me spending a lot of time talking about it on the stump.

    Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion. I am a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I mean, I’m a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law. I am a great admirer of our founding charter, and its resolve to prevent theocracies from forming, and its resolve to prevent disruptive strains of fundamentalism from taking root ion this country.

    As I said before, in my own public policy, I’m very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.

    • Good. – post by cburell

  • Now, that’s different form a belief that values have to inform our public policy. I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values tha tinform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.

    A standard line in my stump speech during this campaign is that my politics are informed by a belief that we’re all connected. That if there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my own child. If there’s a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that’s struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent. And if there’s an Arab American family that’s being rounded up by John Ashcroft without the benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

    I can give religious expression to that. I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, we are all children of God. Or I can express it in secular terms. But the basic premise remains the same. I think sometimes Democrats have made the mistake of shying away from a conversation about values for fear that they sacrifice the important value of tolerance. And I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.

    • Again, good. Sounds more like his Universalist grandparents in Kansas or his mother the hippie. – post by cburell
  • I am disturbed by, let me put it this way: I think there is an enormous danger on the part of public figures to rationalize or justify their actions by claiming God’s mandate.
  • • Amen. If Obama were like Bush, he could claim God sent the economic meltdown to make him, not McCain/Palin, the next president. Thank goodness he knows better. – post by cburell

  • I think there is this tendency that I don’t think is healthy for public figures to wear religion on their sleeve as a means to insulate themselves from criticism, or dialogue with people who disagree with them.

    FALSANI:
    The conversation stopper, when you say you’re a Christian and leave it at that.

    OBAMA:
    Where do you move forward with that?

    This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize.

    • So he’s uncomfortable with proselytizing, evangelism, missionaries. Good. – post by cburell

  • There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell.

    FALSANI:
    You don’t believe that?

    OBAMA:
    I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.

    I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.

    That’s just not part of my religious makeup.

    • Bravo. Obama won’t accept an evil God, even if that’s the one most worshiped, perhaps, by his religion. I’ve always said if Jesus is really up there, he knows I’m a decent guy, and won’t burn me for having too many reasons not to believe the preachers. – post by cburell

  • If all it took was someone proclaiming I believe Jesus Christ and that he died for my sins, and that was all there was to it, people wouldn’t have to keep coming to church, would they.

    FALSANI:
    Do you believe in heaven?

    OBAMA:
    Do I believe in the harps and clouds and wings?

    FALSANI:
    A place spiritually you go to after you die?

    OBAMA:
    What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing.

    When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.

    • Exactly. He’s a modern more than a traditional Christian. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Do you believe in sin?

    OBAMA:
    Yes.

    FALSANI:
    What is sin?

    OBAMA:
    Being out of alignment with my values.

    FALSANI:
    What happens if you have sin in your life?

    OBAMA:
    I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.

    • Bingo. It’s the opposite corollary to what Jesus tries to communicate when he teaches “the Kingdom of Heaven is (already, right now) within you.” If your values are loving – not just of other people, but also of nature and the worlds of art and the mind and the body – and you live them, then life right now feels heavenly. If you’re not living that, you’re sinning, and it feels a bit like hell. – post by cburell

  • Where do you find spiritual inspiration? Music, nature, literature, people, a conduit you plug into?

    OBAMA:
    There are so many.

  • Nothing is more powerful than the black church experience. A good choir and a good sermon in the black church, it’s pretty hard not to be move and be transported.

    • I can relate. Gospel choirs and singers make my own hairs stand on end. – post by cburell
  • I can be transported by watching a good performance of Hamlet, or reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, or listening to Miles Davis.
  • • And for the record, Miles Davis? Yes. And for me, above all, Gustav Mahler. God’s in those sounds. And Mahler was a Nietzschean, not a Christian or Jew, in his beliefs. – post by cburell
    • I tried to explain something similar to my wife yesterday. We’d watched a four-hour biography of FDR, and the experience was spiritual for me – far more than the Bible and other religious texts often are. The spirit sees the sacred in everything, not just stuff produced by religions. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Is there something that you go back to as a touchstone, a book, a particular piece of music, a place …

    OBAMA:
    As I said before, in my own sort of mental library, the Civil Rights movement has a powerful hold on me. It’s a point in time where I think heaven and earth meet. Because it’s a moment in which a collective faith transforms everything. So when I read Gandhi or I read King or I read certain passages of Abraham Lincoln and I think about those times where people’s values are tested, I think those inspire me.

    • “Mental library.” I love it. I call it my “pantheon” – the writers and books who live in my worldview, color my world. My goodness, this intellectual lover of the sublime is going to be President of the United States. Wonderful. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    What are you doing when you feel the most centered, the most aligned spiritually?

    OBAMA:
    I think I already described it. It’s when I’m being true to myself. And that can happen in me making a speech or it can happen in me playing with my kids, or it can happen in a small interaction with a security guard in a building when I’m recognizing them and exchanging a good word.

    • Love it. He describes “spiritual alignment” with a phrase, conscious or not, not from a religious book, but from ART: Shakespeare’s HAMLET. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Is there someone you would look to as an example of how not to do it?

    OBAMA:
    Bin Laden.

    (grins broadly)

    • We could just as easily cite abortion clinic bombers and assassins, crusaders, KKK Cross-burners (that cross and fire are very conscious symbols for their view of good Christianity), gay-bashers, and other haters in the name of God. Probably a smart move to point to Bin Laden instead, in this context. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    … An example of a role model, who combined everything you said you want to do in your life, and your faith?

    OBAMA:
    I think Gandhi is a great example of a profoundly spiritual man who acted and risked everything on behalf of those values but never slipped into intolerance or dogma. He seemed to always maintain an air of doubt about him.

    • Yes. One of my heroes too. And for similar reasons. – post by cburell

  • FALSANI:
    Can we go back to that morning service in 1987 or 88 — when you have a moment that you can go back to that as an epiphany…

    OBAMA:
    It wasn’t an epiphany.

    It was much more of a gradual process for me. I know there are some people who fall out. Which is wonderful. God bless them. For me it was probably because there is a certain self-consciousness that I possess as somebody with probably too much book learning, and also a very polyglot background.

    • I suspect a bit of dishonesty here. Instead of diminishing his conscious decision to commit himself after a life of seeking, he should be proud of that. It’s better to find your faith over years, than to “fall” into it because of an emotional orgy in a church service. The latter shows an unsteadiness of mind and heart; the former shows the opposite.  – post by cburell

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