Obama says his spiritual quest was driven by two main impulses. He was looking for a community that he could call home\u201d\u201da sense of rootedness and belonging he missed from his biracial, peripatetic childhood. The visits to the black churches uptown helped fulfill that desire. “There’s a side very particular to the African-American church tradition that was powerful to me,” he says. The exuberant worship, the family atmosphere and the prophetic preaching at a church such as Abyssinian would have appealed to a young man who lived so in his head. And he became obsessed with the civil-rights movement. He’d become convinced, through his reading, of the transforming power of social activism, especially when paired with religion. This is not an uncommon revelation among the spiritually and progressively minded. (“There’s no more dramatic story in American life” than the story of the civil-rights movement, says North Carolina Rep. David Price, who knows Obama professionally and writes about politics and religion. “You could not continue to be kind and gentle in your personal life and also be denying other people’s humanity.”) When Gerald Kellman recruited Obama to go to Chicago as a community organizer, he remembers, the young man was “very much caught up in the world of ideas.” He was devouring Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” which is part history of the civil-rights movement, part biography of Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n
In Chicago, Obama found that organizers and activists there (and elsewhere) were employing a progressive theology to motivate faith groups to action. Using the writings of Paul Tillich and, especially, Reinhold Niebuhr\u201d\u201dand also King, African-American and Roman Catholic liberation theologians, and Christian fathers like Saint Augustine\u201d\u201dlocal religious leaders emphasized original sin and human imperfection. Christ’s gift of salvation was to the community of believers, not to individual people in isolation. It was therefore the responsibility of the faithful to help each other\u201d\u201dthrough deeds\u201d\u201dto respond to the call of perfection that will be fully realized only at the end of time. Adherents of this particular theology frequently refer to Matthew 25: “Whatever you neglected to do unto the least of these, you neglected to do unto me.” Everyone, in other words, is in this salvation thing together.<\/p>\n
Obama’s organizing days helped clarify his sense of faith and social action as intertwined. “It’s hard for me to imagine being true to my faith\u201d\u201dand not thinking beyond myself, and not thinking about what’s good for other people, and not acting in a moral and ethical way,” he says.<\/p>\n