President Obama’s faith challenge at the Democratic convention

For the casual viewer of the major party political conventions, the ritual presence of religious leaders (who open and close each night’s events with prayer) may be lost. But the candidates and leadership of both parties are aware of the importance of invoking religion at political conventions: two-thirds (67 percent) of voters – including 66 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of independents, and 78 percent of Republicans – say that it’s important for a presidential candidate to have strong religious beliefs.

Last week, former Mass. governor Mitt Romney and the Republican National Convention largely embraced Romney’s Mormon faith, following a well-worn civil religion approach that made general references to God and faith while avoiding the potentially controversial specifics of Mormon theology that clash with his evangelical voter base. This week, as President Obama takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention, he faces a different, but also serious, challenge about how to address his faith while he makes his case for another four years as president.

Like Romney, Obama has faced some challenges on the faith front. As Daniel Cox and I noted in a recent chapter on Obama’s faith in “Religion and the American Presidency,” Obama made his entrance to the national stage with a speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention that was full of religious language, such as traditional biblical allusions (“It is that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work”) and references to contemporary Christian music (“we worship an awesome God in the blue states”). This speech was also remarkable because it broke through at a time when the “values voters” movement was on the rise and Democrats were being lambasted for being perceived as unfriendly to religion.
Read the rest here