Eighteen Years On: Answering Obama’s “Call to Renewal”
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Stephen Blinder: Returning to then-Senator Barack Obama’s 2006 address to the Call to Renewal conference as we fast approach November’s elections is a deeply nostalgic yet unmistakably agonizing experience. In his speech to a gathering of the oft-overlooked religious left – exemplified by Call to Renewal’s leader, Reverend Jim Wallis – Obama successfully walked a line few progressives seem willing to travel today. Addressing the enduring question of “how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy,” Obama called on the audience and, by extension, Americans en masse to engage in “deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country.” With American democracy at a crossroads amidst the 2024 elections, resurrecting Obama’s call to action has never been so imperative.
Obama’s observations in 2006 remain largely unchanged. Republicans have continued to falsely warn “evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.” Meanwhile, Democrats have generally avoided entering the fray, allowing Republicans to run freely with such narratives. Former President Donald Trump, for example, claimed this summer that “[y]ou just can’t vote Democrat…[t]hey’re against religion.” Never mind that, according to Obama, “[f]aith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts” or that “the separation of church and state has played [a critical role] in preserving not only our democracy but the robustness of our religious practice.”
In a futile attempt to cast politics as a purely secular space, many Democrats moreover have succumbed, as Obama feared, to “dismiss[ing] religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical.” No wonder, then, that “there has been a 20 percentage point rise in the share of White evangelicals who associate with the GOP” across the past thirty years, in addition to Republican “gains among White nonevangelical and White Catholic voters,” according to Pew Research.
What Democrats neglect is that religion alone is not a gateway toward conservatism or extremism but is, at best, a safe harbor for many Americans suffering under our country’s worsening epidemic of loneliness, to which Senator Chris Murphy has called in response for a “spiritual renaissance.” Following the lead of those like Obama eighteen years ago and Murphy today, Democrats must see beyond religion’s worst excesses to religion’s indispensable role in elevating American democracy.
Crucially, inviting religion into the public sphere cannot involve superficial appeals or, on the other end of the spectrum, a totalizing approach. The former invites only the ill-natured to “fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends,” as Obama warned. Equally pernicious is holding religious perspectives to an inviolable standard. Democrats must heed Obama’s reminder that pluralistic democracy “demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values” and that, fundamentally, “[p]olitics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.” Striking that balance is difficult, as Obama would undoubtedly concede, and even more so in today’s politically charged environment. Yet, fostering positive religious discourse is also within the grasp of the many well-intentioned, patient, and humble among us.
In his “The Other America” address, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, religion and education will have to do that…” America has taken important steps forward, though by no means enough, in the struggle to see the promise of “equal justice under law” not as a buzzphrase but as a reality for all. But just as King understood in 1967, religion has an outsized role in realizing our country’s potential because, as Obama echoed in 2006, “it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds.” To succeed in this mission, Democrats must look to religion not with puzzlement or menace but with hope and affinity. If this happens across the country, we can answer Obama’s call to renewal.
United in our shared humanity and our dreams of a better, brighter future, let us all join Obama in the “hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.” At this defining juncture, let us all join Obama in this “prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come.”
Stephen Blinder is a staff writer for On the Record. He is a senior studying government and philosophy in the College of Arts & Sciences.