A passage from Obama’s bestseller “The Audacity of Hope”, highlights the role of her mother Ann in shaping his son’s complex identity. According to her, Obama writes, a certain knowledge of the biggest religions of the world was integral part of a good education: “In our home the Bible, the Koran, where on the shelf together with the books of Greek, Scandinavian and African mythology. At Easter or at Christmas she was perhaps dragging me alone with her to the church, just as she was dragging me to the Buddhist temple, to the celebration of the Chinese New Year’s Day, to the Shinto’s sanctuary and to the ancient Hawaiian burial-places necropolis.”
Was Barack Obama Muslim?
Obama’s father was native from Kenya and many people from his village were Muslims. He didn’t practice the Islam religion and, on top of that, he was not very religious. Later he met Obama’s mother, a Christian from Kansas, married her and then divorced.
It was Obama’s mother to care about her son’s education, thus, as Obama himself affirmed several times, he has always been a Christian. And, in fact, he is a practicing Christian, far from being atheist, he is converted to one of the most liberal evangelic churches of the United States, the United Church of Christ, one of the first to ordain Afro-American pastors (1785) and recently even to admit gay marriages. We find ourselves on a ground where faith is connected, without creating a dangerous joining, with the spirit of a higher transformation.
So we find Obama in the groove of the tradition and of the principle of the civil religion in which coagulate “the whole spectrum of beliefs and conventions, of rites and symbols that keep together the democracy of the United States”.
The only links that Obama could have had with the Islam religion are related to his Kenyan origins and his stay in Indonesia, a Muslim country, the attendance of Indonesian schools where his mother was teaching.
In spite of this, Obama was never a practicing Islamist, even if thanks to this he could understand how these people think, and establish better relationships with the Middle East.
On the other hand the Muslims don’t believe that professing the Islamic faith is crucially important; according to them, who is born by Muslim father is a Muslim by birth. Moreover, every child that has an Arabic name based upon the trilateral root H,S,N (as Hussein, Hassan, etc…) can be considered Muslims. Therefore, for them, it is enough to consider the full Obama’s name, Barack Hussein Obama, to state that he is Muslim by birth.
Thus religion, for Obama, was not only an electoral strategy as many have thought, something on what his strategists suggested him to count on, is instead something real, that changed him forever.
Obama, through a complex path of spiritual research, combine with the American liberal tradition a modern evangelic faith, open and interactive, and is able to talk in a persuasive way both to the believers and to the lays. Also his strong social engagement is related with his religious thought.
The modern Obama’s liberalism, therefore, meeting with an open and interactive model of Christian faith, come to propose to all Americans a potential and huge civil and moral regeneration of the society.
Obama not only divided the republicans, but, on the square, the first he divided were actually the Afro-Americans because they did not consider him, and some still do not considering him, as their product. “Too white to be black”, this is the slogan that quite often was on the main headings of the American newspapers. Besides, the Afro-Americans were wondering if Obama, with a successful past on his back, could really represents them. In fact he never lived in a black ghetto and he never knew the problems related to the majority of the Black Americans.
America today is not anymore the same as forty years ago, but the black people still suffer of a sense of alienation, and that’s why Obama, initially, was received with coldness and suspiciousness. Things got better with the passing of time, also thanks to the many interventions made by Michelle, who, on the contrary, comes from the ghetto.
She has talked several times about their history, about the need of giving dignity to the Afro-Americans and overcoming the divisions.
The USA president, as his mother, declares himself a convinced follower of the Golden Rule, that is the ethic of reciprocity common to different spiritual and philosophical experiences: do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. During his first prayer breakfast, Obama affirms that whatever are the differences in each of us, there is a law that keeps together all the big religions.
Hot themes: abortion and gay marriages
Obama has always expressed his personal opinion on the laws concerning the recognition in every State of the marriage between same sex people.
On the theme of abortion, the president of USA, is expressly favorable to a substantial liberalization and this, therefore, brought him, in more than one occasion, to clashes even strong with the catholic church. As a member of the United Church of Christ, Obama believes that the marriage is a holy union blessed by God only if it is between a man and a woman. On the other hand, however, he is open to the possibility of revaluating his opinion; he could consider his opinion as “wrong” and for this reason he is not favorable to laws that forbid the gay union, accounting them as discriminatory.
Many gay people hoped that Obama could have extended his message of tolerance.
“When my parents got married in 1961,
it would be illegal for them to be married in a number of States in the South.
So obviously, this is something that I understand intimately, it’s something that touches me deeply”
This is the answer that Barack Obama gave to a group of gay supporters that asked him what he was thinking in regard. But then he concluded saying that, today as in the past, it is more important to fight for equal rights in employment and against the gay discrimination rather than for the marriage.
In one of the several speeches delivered in regard, Obama always underlined the fact that he was a Christian and that he wouldn’t like, therefore, to mix up his religious beliefs whit his political choices; in spite of this, he is completely convinced that faith and tradition establish that marriage is blessed only if between man and woman.
In his book “The audacity of hope”, Obama refers to a question that regards a lesbian constituent of him, who made him notice that she was feeling, in a way, discriminated by the fact that his missing support was having reference to his Christian faith.
Abortion for Barack Obama really seems to be a pain in the neck, his Achilles’ heel in that catholic America where abortion was introduced in 1973 from the Supreme Court. In most of the European countries abortion was introduced by a legislative decree and that means that there has been a public debate during which different opinions were taken into account. But not in America. Moreover, Evangelists and Catholics, in the 80s, united to fight against abortion and stop all the attempts to eliminate religion in the public places.
During his years as an Illinois senator, Obama voted against a law according to which a parent should be informed if an underage daughter decides to abort, stating that it is important to defend the freedom of choice of a woman. The purpose of the USA president is to make the abortions less frequent, to discourage the unwanted pregnancies, to encourage the adoptions. Banning the abortion, Obama says, will not remove the problem.
The president believes that those who are motivated by a religious feeling must translate their own interests into universal values and not into values strictly connected with religion. Everyone’s proposals must be discussed, and must be reconciled by reason. Obama sets straight that he himself could be unfavorable to abortion for purely religious reasons, but if he passes a law that bans this practice, he cannot only lean on the Church teachings or evoke the God’s will, but it must be explained why abortion violate a principle open to groups of every religion, even to who does not have any.
This could result strange for all of who that believe in the infallibility of the Bible, as the evangelists.
Apart from being religious or not, people are tired of seeing that faith is used as a weapon. People does not want it to be used to decry or divide. They cannot take it anymore to hear people that instead of preaching say bragging. Because, to sum up, this is not how people conceive faith in their lives.
In conclusion, president Obama does not yet express himself in a definitive way on the chance of legalizing the gay marriages, restricting himself to sustain the civil union.
