You probably forgot about Barack Obama’s 2006 speech on faith and politics. I did too. It feels of a different time, one that is no longer relevant. In my new book with the Evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk — Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life — we talk about the beforetimes as follows:
Watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debate taxes and health-care policy before the 2012 presidential election, Americans didn’t realize how lucky they were. The relative staidness of US politics was a historical aberration. The natural state of politics is much more tribal and apocalyptic, as we would soon find out. The conflicts in Europe and the Middle East foretold what was coming for American shores.
In some ways, Obama’s address as a then candidate for president was well ahead of its time. This was before the Democratic Party had undergone its full secularization, becoming — or seeming to become — largely inhospitable to people and communities of faith.
But Obama sensed, then, that his party was conceding too much religious ground to conservatives and that progressives needed to find ways to speak with moral conviction and authority. In this effort, religion was an ally, just as it was for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln when they exhorted Americans to aspire to something greater beyond themselves.
Obama spoke of the loneliness crisis before we recognized it as such:
Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds — dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets — and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough… They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before.
Democrats had a tendency towards what I’ve called in the past “what works-ism” — that merely resorting to technocratic appeals could be enough to persuade. But it wasn’t enough to provide people with charts and data telling them that one policy or another worked better. Because human beings aren’t rational automatons who carefully consider different policy proposals side-by-side and then choose accordingly. Our policy differences aren’t just policy differences, they are rooted in something deeper. They are often rooted in what we at Wisdom of Crowds like to call “first principles.”
Again, Obama seemed to understand this emotional, existential tenor of politics:
After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.
Interestingly, Obama acknowledged that all law is a moral proposition:
So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
When progressives rail at conservatives for “legislating morality,” they neglect the fact that they, too, legislate morality.
But Obama, being the good liberal he was and is, still seemed in thrall to the liberal Rawlsian consensus. John Rawls, probably the most influential liberal philosopher of the 20th century, famously argued that religious people with “comprehensive doctrines” can be as religious as they like with one important caveat: when they enter the public, political arena, they must speak translate and edit their religious convictions in ways that would be intelligible to non-religious people.
Obama again:
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Here, Obama appears to be creating a dichotomy between religion and reason. Secular arguments are reasonable. Religious arguments are not. But, of course, when liberals make public arguments, they are operating with a set of background liberal assumptions, and no one expects them to do otherwise. Liberalism isn’t quite a religion, but it is an ideological orientation. It is not neutral, because no politics is neutral.
The election of Donald Trump marked the end of this illusion of neutrality. It became clear that our divides were not amenable to mere reason or “rational” debate. It wouldn’t be possible to argue or persuade our way to a better politics. The post-ideological age that Obama gestured towards was, in fact, the last gasp of an old, outmoded way of viewing politics. Just as Egyptians and Tunisians were during the Arab Spring, Americans found themselves animated by fundamentally divergent conceptions of the Good. The question was no longer “what works?” The question was “who are we?” Our public life, in the Trumpian age, would become transformed into a battle over not politics but the starting assumptions of politics.
Even the fact that Obama gave his 2006 speech was itself evidence of a kind of odd hope: that words themselves could create something resembling unity or consensus, when of course they couldn’t. And they didn’t.
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Wonderfully written Shadi, thanks for getting WoC essays back into my feed!
I know you and I both have Obama reservations but man, I miss those last dying breaths of the old guard, and especially their speech-writers.
This is, as ever, really wonderful. I do think the site of public contestation is growing ever fiercer, and it is not that Rawlsian liberalism cannot meet the challenge; it is that those who genuinely believe in that form of politics have not expressed, clearly enough, at least, the reasons why they want it. It strikes me that we are in a transformational moment that Obama's rhetoric matched, but policies did not. There is a broader coalitional failure politically, across the West, where liberal progressives have not fought hard enough to defend their values. The slow march of regressive views is now speeding up, and with AI threatening core democratic principles this is even more dangerous.