What Obama Believes About God

Ominous messages started arriving in Stephen Mansfield's inbox the moment it became known that he'd had the audacity to write a sympathetic book about Barack Obama's religious faith.

"I got death threats, oh yeah," says Mansfield, a conservative evangelical author who lives in downtown Nashville. "Some folks said, 'You need to be careful because you may not be alive by the election if you keep this up.' "

Mansfield, a former pastor, got another taste of conservative ire when he went on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show this month as his book, The Faith of Barack Obama, was coming out.

Sean Hannity, the show's combative co-host, went after his guest on the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's now-famous former minister.

Mansfield, who defends Wright in his book as "brilliant, angry, successful and unapologetic," writes extensively about Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. He concludes that in addition to certain controversial elements of black liberation theology—dropping A-bombs on Japan were "massacres of a people of color by a white nation," for instance—the church offers the "born-again, new birth, blood-washed, Spirit-empowered Christianity" familiar to evangelicals everywhere (even if there is a picture of a black Jesus hanging in the lobby).

On Hannity & Colmes, Mansfield had just finished dismissing claims that Obama ever was a Muslim and describing Obama as "a serious Christian," when Hannity pounced.

Hannity: Steve, is it possible to sit in the pews for 20 years and not know where Rev. Wright is coming from?

Mansfield: I don't think so. I don't think so.

Hannity: So he [Obama] probably lied to us?

Mansfield: No, I don't think he lied to us. I think that there's a mixture ...

Hannity: OK. He said, "That's not the man I knew."

Mansfield: Well, I don't know about you, Sean, but I've sat in churches and listened to pastors and sometimes been surprised by the things that...

Hannity: Chickens coming home to roost. G.D. America. Have you ever sat in a church that said that?

Mansfield: I've never sat in a church like that. But let me say this...

Hannity: He didn't condemn him, even after he said that.

Mansfield: Well, no he—he did, actually.

It went on from there. Mansfield, who says he's a friend of Hannity's, laughs about it now. "You know how it is, it's political entertainment," he says in a Scene interview. "Hannity just hates Obama so much. He's not happy that I would say anything kind about him at all."

Mansfield's book is especially hard for conservatives to take because they feel betrayed. A best-selling biographer of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, the author is a pro-life Bush supporter who says he won't vote for Obama himself. Yet in his new book, he gushes over what he sees as Obama's potential to wrest evangelical Christians from the Republican Party.

Obama is actively courting evangelical voters, particularly young ones who may find poverty and global warming as important as abortion and gay marriage. Witness his visit last weekend to a forum on faith at the Rev. Rick Warren's evangelical megachurch.

It's true that Obama is more comfortable talking publicly about his faith than John McCain. But Mansfield writes, "For Obama, faith is not simply political garb, something a focus group told him he ought to try. Instead, religion to him is transforming, lifelong and real."

Mansfield finds religious meaning even in what most evangelicals would see as Obama's faults. When Obama details his past drug use and drinking, that's showing "an unusual openness" that's "equally a function of faith." Obama "is a man comfortable with confession."

In our interview, Mansfield says he aimed in his book to present an objective view of Obama's faith. "Here's a Democratic candidate who's saying, 'I think faith ought to come into play in the public square. In an age when we know what kind of underwear a presidential candidate wears and what his dog's name is, we certainly ought to know what he believes in religiously, especially if he's saying he's going to carry it into the Oval Office."

Mansfield concedes "there's a limit" to the number of evangelicals who might vote for Obama. "For most Christian voters, gay rights and abortion are bedrock litmus test issues. You're just not going to shift them."

On the other hand, he adds, there are an increasing number of evangelicals who are "getting a little more sophisticated and starting to realize there's more issues for them to consider."

In fact, according to Mansfield, Obama's liberal views on religion are where most of the country is heading. Public-opinion surveys confirm it. Mansfield is talking about Obama's doubts about the afterlife, his belief that Christianity isn't the only way to God, and his picking and choosing what to take from the Bible.

"He's very post-modern," Mansfield says. "Pay attention to Obama religiously because that's the culture we're becoming, like it or not. That's why he's important on the issue of religion. He's a symbol of that."