Faith Matters
The Church Program
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Barack Obama – Hope for African Americans
The Democrats’ presidential candidate Barack Obama could become the first non-white president of the United States. That would be one of many spectacular changes to the way politics is done in Washington. The religious colour in the White House would change, too. While conservative Christians were responsible for electing George W. Bush as president twice, if Barack Obama won the election the new president of the United States would be a liberal Protestant.
Obama recently left his congregation, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation that firmly follows black liberation theology. It wasn’t because he was turning his back on the church. It was the behaviour of the local pastor Jeremiah Wright, who baptized Obama around 20 years ago and who also officiated at his marriage a few years later. In his sermons, the Rev. Mr Wright called the US a racist country and claimed the terrorist attacks of September 11 were the logical consequence of America’s arrogant global policies. Obama’s election-campaign team believed the pastor’s radical views endangered Barack Obama’s chances of being elected. Thus he left the congregation for political reasons. The candidate does stress, however, that he still considers himself a Christian. During his election campaign Obama has remained open to a wide variety of different churches and religious groups.
This is not the first time he has demonstrated oecumenical openness. In 1985 he got a job as a "community organizer", a kind of social worker, in the southern suburbs of Chicago. The area known as South Side is inhabited almost exclusively by African Americans. After the decline of the local steel industry in the 80s this area was dominated by unemployment, drugs and violence. As a young social worker he motivated the people living in the ghettos to find and fight for their own solutions to their problems. Presidential candidate Barack Obama still takes this approach. He is trying to apply the participation concept from Chicago’s South Side to politics in general. Black America is enthusiastically supporting the former social worker, who could soon become the country’s president. They have monumental hopes for their man in the White House.
