Pundits were shocked when Obama didn’t make a Clintonian swerve to the center during his state of the union, effectively offering his own “stay the course” moment. But wait! An obviously planted news story on the president’s spirituality!
Every morning, sometimes as early as 5:30 a.m., a short religious passage comes across President Obama’s BlackBerry, sent by one of his aides.
At other moments, Obama prays privately, his advisers said. And when he takes his family to Camp David on the weekends, a Navy chaplain ministers to them, with the daughters attending a form of Sunday school there.
Pardon my saying this, but why do his advisers know that he prays privately if he … prays privately?
And what’s the point of the timestamp? Is it that important for us to know that Obama gets his religion good and early, unlike the heathen who turns to scripture only at the ungodly hour of 11 a.m. Eastern? It’s like he’s an early-morning spiritual jogger who enjoys his quiet time.
On the one hand…
More than a year into his presidency, Obama has not chosen a church in Washington, and has attended services just four times. No single figure has assumed the role of spiritual adviser — publicly, at least — or filled the vacancy created when Obama disavowed his former Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Yet on the other hand…
The “daily devotionals” Obama receives via e-mail from Joshua Dubois, director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, offer him a line to that faith, officials said.
The messages come from “a range of sources,” an official said — sometimes a passage of Scripture or, on an upbeat day, a psalm.
On an upbeat day? Does he read Revelations when he’s feeling pretty low? Deuteronomy? If he’s feeling so-so, does he turn to the apocrypha to perk him up?
At other times the daily message will come from a book that Dubois thinks the president would enjoy. More than once the devotional has been culled from the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian who wrote extensively on the “just war” theory, which Obama has cited in his thinking about Afghanistan and in his Nobel prize acceptance speech. Other devotionals come from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which Obama was given as a gift at last year’s prayer breakfast.
Following the Post’s rigorous standards for anonymous sources, reporter Anne Kornblut writes:
One senior official described the president as “a prayerful guy.”
Wow. Just out of curiosity, if faith is kind of important to the Obama family, why is it that neither parent has yet found a church for the kids? It’s been a year. When Jeremiah Wright was Obama’s pastor, he considered faith important enough that he attended church despite the tirades that Obama would later say he was against. But now, in a place where there are much tamer parishes, it’s less important?
According to this article, Obama takes his faith seriously, which is why, in fact, he has this guy who’s plugged into the whole religious thing (we can call him a “spiritual czar”) who shoots him an email with a pretty good passage from scripture before he hops on the elliptical.
The fact that such a story comes up only at a time when the president goes to meet with the National Prayer breakfast would indicate that this is yet another exercise in political theater.
It’s not that the president isn’t entitled to determine his own religiosity. It’s that the press is all too willing to cover the “private nature” of his faith by offering a variety of contradicting platitudes. If his advisers are talking to the press about it, then it means it’s being put out for public consumption. But it’s not very informative.
