Book Review: The Faith of Barack Obama

By Stephen Mansfield
Hardcover, 164 pp., $19.99
Thomas Nelson

Who is Barack Obama?

Most of us in the Christian faith community (what we, in simpler times, called the church) are more used to asking that question about Jesus Christ.

That the character of a person, especially a presidential candidate, is primarily understood in terms of his or her personal faith is a revealing of these times.

That fact is also what makes Barack Obama, in Stephen Mansfield's view, the Everyman of the new millennium. He is a spiritual pilgrim who talks as openly of his faith as of his political views and, indeed, insists that the two cannot be fully separated.

Mansfield's brief book surveys Obama's early life, his association with Trinity United Church of Christ and it's controversial former pastor Jeremiah Wright, and his current view on the relationship between faith and public life. What emerges is a man of decided religious faith, but one that cannot be neatly defined by labels such as evangelical or mainline. The author pictures Obama as an aggregate of races, classes, and Christian theologies--not unlike the millennial generation from which he has drawn such avid support.

The book helps to understand Obama's faith and, to an almost equal extent, the current landscape of church/state politics. Two especially helpful chapters are one that contextualizes the controversial Jeremiah Wright in the landscape of Black theology and another that places Obama in a quartet of faith portraits alongside John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Mansfield's conclusion is that Obama may be in a unique position to heal the national wounds by bringing faith and politics together in a kinder, gentler way.

The significant weakness of the book is that it relies so heavily on Obama's own book that it at times feels like a book report for The Audacity of Hope.

Overall, an interesting and helpful book.

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