During his visit last Sunday to the Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, South Carolina, Barack Obama became the only presidential candidate to endorse the establishment of “a Kingdom of God.” Obama has been praised for previous remarks on religion and politics, but his appearance before the South Carolina congregation has gone largely unnoticed. Think of the reaction had one of the leading Republican presidential candidates said what Obama did: “I am confident that we can create a Kingdom of God right here on Earth.” Charges that the Republican is a theocrat, maybe? In figuring out what Obama might have meant, it would be naive to think that, though a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he was speaking as a churchman – that the “we” in that statement means “the church.” After all, Obama is looking for votes (especially from more frequent church-goers, a cohort that goes heavily for Republican candidates). Moreover, while in other contexts saluted for his intellect and sophistication, Obama seemed in his remarks clueless about Biblical theology, unaware that in the New Testament the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) has both arrived and is yet to come, and that it is not something we “build” but receive. No, Obama was speaking as the politician running for president that he is, and the “we,” fairly read, means those, churched or not, who support his progressive politics. Thus, “a Kingdom of God here on earth” means for Obama a United States in which his politics are realized, more or less – that United States having been built by those of us who have joined the progressive movement led by him, our president, the chief builder. There is nothing especially new about this kind of Kingdom of God talk. In his recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity, Samuel Huntington identifies as an enduring aspect of our culture “the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.'” The progressives of a century ago certainly held that belief, hoping for the abatement of poverty, among other things. At RWOC, of all places – the church would not be described as theologically liberal – Obama placed himself in that religio-political tradition. It is, by the way, the same tradition to which Hillary Clinton claims allegiance. So one question this presidential race poses is whether that tradition, in retreat for decades, can make a comeback. Even a small comeback could help the Democrats win the White House.
