Dems Pimping Faith

Barack Obama has been pimping faith, any faith, for political power since the beginning of his professional career as a community organizer.  Early on he made a conscious, callous decision to use the pulpit, any pulpit, to attempt to mobilize people into action.  This is not a secret, it has been documented repeatedly, yet it has been marketed as most things Obama have been, it is what it is, but it means anything you want it to.

Until recently, when Barack Obama touted his Muslim family members and growing up in a Muslim country on Al Arabiya TV, associating the word, “Muslim,” or anything that might possibly remotely hint at a relationship of any sort between Obama and anything Islamic, including his given name, was considered a completely out of bounds “smear.”  Even when he himself slipped up and referred to his “Muslim faith,” specualtion about the nature of the slip and what it might mean, was treated as being highly offensive and unfair to the “Christian” man.  The “Christian” man who, as far as anyone knows, has never been baptized, (if anybody has any evidence showing he has, I’ll apologize) who could divorce himself from his church and “pastor who brought him to Jesus” when it became politically expedient to do so, and has used every one of his rare church visits in the last 2 years of campaigning and being elected to the presidency as a photo-op, skillfully talks the Christian talk without being expected to walk the Christian walk.

In 1990 Obama wrote:

“Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and – most importantly – values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.”

Clearly, Obama is not embracing a religious philosophy here.  This article from the Catholic Citizens of Illinois, claims that Obama’s early community organizing efforts were almost exclusively funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development:

It is also responsible, in some part, for the fact that forty years later, we have a virulently pro-abortion, pro-homosexual presidential candidate whose principle political training has been in Alinskyian organizing. While he – Barak Obama – was lead organizer in Chicago for the Developing Communities Project, it received a $40,000 Catholic Campaign for Human Development grant in 1985 and a $33,000 grant in 1986.

While he was in Chicago Obama was trained by the top Alinskyian organizers. One mentor was the ex-Jesuit, Greg Galuzzo, lead organizer for Gamaliel. The Developing Communities Project operated under the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of Alinskyian organizations that receive 4-5% of all Catholic Campaign for Human Development grants each year.

The Developing Communities Project, which hired Obama as lead organizer, was an offshoot of Jerry Kellman’s Calumet Community Religious Conference. Kellman, another of Obama’s mentors, was himself trained by Alinsky. The network of community organizations Alinsky founded, the Industrial Areas Foundation, receives about 16% of all Catholic Campaign for Human Development grants annually.

After Obama went to Harvard Law School, he returned to Chicago and taught Alinskyian organizing to ACORN staff. Although ACORN has a different structure than other Alinskyian networks, its tactical philosophy and world view are formed by men who were trained by Alinsky, in a sort of diabolical apostolic succession. Obama ran ACORN’s 1992 voter-registration drive, Project Vote, and in turn received ACORN’s endorsement for Illinois senator. ACORN annually receives about 5% of Catholic Campaign for Human Development grants.

While working for the Developing Communities Project before he went to Harvard, Obama ran smack into his personal, yet unusual, “crisis of faith:”

Mr. Obama faced skepticism from Baptist and Pentecostal pastors unwilling to use their influence to help him organize their members. His group had consisted almost entirely of Catholic churches, and its top officials were white and Jewish.

“Barack had to get beyond the accusation that he was working for Catholics and Jews who were trying to make money off the community,” Mr. Kellman said.

Mr. Obama wrote that a minister suggested it would be helpful if he belonged to a church, and he joined the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s congregation after hearing a sermon about faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Wright’s sermons have been an issue in the campaign.

In his paramount achievement, Mr. Obama persuaded a number of these pastors to enlist their churches as members of the Developing Communities Project. Fortunately for Mr. Obama, a new wave of younger pastors was replacing the older guard.

So, it seems clear that Obama’s “faith” is pragmatically based.  Religion, throughout his career, has been a tool, first for community, then political organizing, and nothing more.  In 1995, the Chicago Reader reported:

In an interview after the class, Obama again spoke of the need to organize and mobilize the economic power and moral fervor of black churches. He also argued that as a state senator he might help bring this about faster than as a community organizer or civil rights lawyer.

“What we need in America, especially in the African-American community, is a moral agenda that is tied to a concrete agenda for building and rebuilding our communities,” he said. “We have moved beyond the clarion call stage that was needed during the civil rights movement. Now, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, we must move into a building stage. We must invest our energy and resources in a massive rebuilding effort and invent new mechanisms to strengthen and hasten this community-building effort.

How fortunate that the Democratic Party has been similarly influenced.  It is unclear just how much of that influence comes directly from Barack Obama, however.  In fact, a lot of it comes via Howard Dean, a guy who wouldn’t seem to know the difference between an Apostle and a Popsicle if it wasn’t for the stick.  He does seem to know a good idea from his chief of staff when he hears one.  The story goes that Rev. Leah Daughtry, a fifth generation Pentecostal minister who previously worked for former DNC Chair, Terry McAuliffe, and, who went on to organize the Democratic National Convention in Dever, got the gig because she put a particularly juicy bug in Howdy Doody Dean’s ear:

WHEN HOWARD DEAN BECAME CHAIRMAN of the Democratic National Committee in early 2005, Daughtry, who had been working as the chief of staff to Dean’s predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, approached Dean with the newly arrived results of a poll she commissioned to try to sort out John Kerry’s defeat in 2004. She didn’t expect to stay on during Dean’s tenure, but she wanted Dean to reckon with what the survey of voters in eight battleground states had found: that “nearly half of the electorate,” as the Democratic pollster, Cornell Belcher, explained in a memo accompanying his results, “place as much or more weight on their religious faith as they do other conventional issue considerations when deciding how to vote.”

Daughtry became Dean’s chief of staff and was allowed, even enthusiastically encouraged by the man some called “one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history,” to put her plan in action and hire a “Faith In Action” team, a group comprised of all the elements of a Borsht Belt comic’s joke: “three evangelicals, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew.”  The group, which at the time of the writing of the quoted New York Times article, July 20, 2008, was said to meet weekly at DNC headquarters in Washington, was also expected to be absorbed into the Obama campaign.

The shared political philosophy of Daughtry and Obama must have seemed pure serendipity, though Daughtry’s efforts are faith driven, while Obama’s are purely political.  No matter, both are equally committed to the principle of taking one’s help where one finds it.

To forge bonds with the faithful, the party has not relied solely on its six F.I.A. members. Daughtry also assembled a 60-member Faith Advisory Council, consisting mostly of leading representatives of the clergy, to help make it clear that the Democrats care about religion. She oversaw the purchase of radio ads promoting the party on Christian stations during the 2006 elections. Her role is personal as well as programmatic. She helps Dean lace his speeches with, as she puts it, “the language of values rather than what Democrats are known for, which is facts and figures.” When Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign and is now a Democratic National Committee member, called, wanting to include a strong woman from the Bible in an address she was preparing to give at a Catholic university, Daughtry supplied her with the story of Deborah.

Another key member of the flock, Mara Vanderslice, a born-again evangelical who conducted the poll Daughtry, (a devotee of conservative scaring Black Liberation Theology proponent, Rev. James Cone like Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright) used to persuade Dean to embrace faith for votes, is now guiding Democratic candidates to glory through her Common Good Strategies consulting firm.  And, while not all Dems are quite comfortable with the pulpit pimping, the Democratic Party is committed to it as a viable, integral part of it’s long-term strategy.

Yet, as we’ve seen with Obama’s inaugural embrace of Pastor Rick Warren, and the bungling of the televising of the carrot-toss appearance of his opposite, Rev. Gene Robinson, as well as his protracted disentanglement from Jeremiah Wright, and the apparent capitulation to pro-life conservatives on funding for family planning, such blatant exploitation with no personal religious commitment is fraught with pitfalls, being as ugly and offensive as such behavior inherently is.  While tolerance of religious diversity should be a cornerstone of democracy in my opinion, it shouldn’t be a Democratic Party issue at all.

*NOTE: More on Obama and faith at No Quarter, and, at the Real Barack Obama here and here.