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With all the rumors swirling around Barack Obama’s faith, the teaser for Newsweek‘s July 21st cover story—”The Truth about Barack Obama’s Religious Faith”— promises more revelations about the candidate’s links to radical African-American theology and/or to Islam. Instead it delivers something far more surprising: a look at the threads of faith that a serious person has woven together from his idiosyncratic life. The article describes how Obama, the child of an ecumenicist mother and a Muslim-turned-atheist father, became a Christian as an adult. “I’m on my own faith journey and I’m searching,” the presumptive Democratic nominee tells Newsweek. “I leave open the possibility that I’m entirely wrong.”
It’s a unique angle for a mainstream publication to take. A new study from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that, when when the press has covered religion this campaign season, it has generally focused on candidates’ affiliations and/or their relationships with controversial religious leaders. But another study from PEJ’s sister organization, the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, shows that such coverage bears little resemblance to how Americans actually live their faith. Instead, most Americans are far more similar to Barack Obama: open to religious pluralism and non-dogmatic about translating their faith into politics.
The top religion story of the 2008 presidential elections concerned the political ramifications of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith in his bid for the GOP nomination. Stories about Romney’s Mormonism accounted for 35 percent of religion-related campaign coverage in this cycle, and a whopping 50 percent of such stories in 2007. The Romney storyline, PEJ suggests, was framed even before he entered the race. The study quotes a Boston Globe headline from 2005, when Romney first confirmed he was contemplating a White House run: “Are we ready for a Mormon president?” Even when concerns about his Mormonism forced Romney to give an entire speech about his beliefs, he primarily addressed questions about his views on faith in public life, offering little insight about his personal relationship to and maturation in his faith.
Romney shuttered his campaign around the time that incendiary clips of Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, caught the media’s attention. Thanks to his association with the now-controversial Wright, Obama went from being the focus of 5 percent of religion-related campaign stories to the focus of 55 percent. According to PEJ, half of these stories also featured Wright as a leading newsmaker, often “accompanying Obama in the headline or lead.” During the two months after the story first drew media attention, stories concerning Rev. Wright accounted for 12 percent of all campaign coverage. (John McCain’s relationship with Rev. John Hagee largely passed unnoticed.)
Neither the coverage of Romney’s Mormonism nor the Obama/Wright controversy went very deep into the candidates’ personal relationships with their beliefs or how they arrived at those beliefs. Many will object that candidates’ personal beliefs are not relevant in a country whose constitution bars a “religious test” for elective office. But voters clearly care about their office holders’ faith—69 percent of Americans say they think it is important for a president to hold strong religious beliefs.
If voters take politicians’ religions seriously, perhaps the press could do a better job of covering the issue in a way that takes seriously the way Americans live their faiths. By that measure, the PEJ study of the Romney and Obama religion coverage shows that the press is doing a terrible job.
Another recent study, based on a survey of 35,000 Americans from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, depicts a country with diverse and nuanced beliefs. The Religious Landscape Survey concludes that religion in America is “Non-Dogmatic, Diverse, and Politically Relevant.” An overwhelming majority of people with a religious affiliation—70 percent—say “many religions can lead to eternal life.” (This includes 57 percent of evangelical Protestants, a fact that is important to note in light of the question that Rev. Franklin Graham reportedly put to Obama about whether Jesus was the only “way to God.”) Almost as many, 68 percent, say that “there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion.”
Assuming politicians’ relationships to their faiths are similarly nuanced, reports on candidates’ religious affiliations give little insight into what they actually believe. And while polling shows that voters are uncomfortable with candidates of certain affiliations—especially atheists, Muslims, and Mormons—this election cycle provides evidence that voters will accept candidates who have a nuanced relationship with their faith. Obama and Rev. Wright might be a case in point: as the media whipped up a frenzy about Rev. Wright, Obama suffered no appreciable drop in the polls, even at the height of the controversy. Voters seemed to accept his explanation about his differences with his pastor—maybe because they have plenty of differences with their own pastors.
The Newsweek story may make some readers uncomfortable—it is an especially intimate portrait of the possible future president’s faith. But it is one of the few stories of this campaign season that actually shows a candidate living his faith in a way that would seem familiar to most Americans. Spiritual life is often described with travel metaphors: “faith journey,” “walking with Jesus,” “spiritual quest.” Such language is, in part, an acknowledgement that beliefs change over time, that people of faith are engaged in ongoing projects of discovery as their lives present them with new circumstances. Perhaps it is the sort of language that reporters should start to use more often.
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