COMMENTARY: For This Pol, One Nation Under God

The moderate-conservative columnist discusses the religious views of Sen. Barack Obama, the black liberal Democrat from Illinois: "It strikes me that Obama is vice presidential material because he realizes that the donkeys need no longer wear the dunce cap when it comes to taking on the elephants and competing for the evangelical vote. You read right; that's how it is. Whether one likes it or not, an American cannot become victorious in a national election at this point if he - or she! - is thought to be godless or contemptuous of Christianity. This may be difficult for all of the liberals, radicals and intellectuals who might be Christian, Jews, agnostics or atheists. This is especially true if they believe that religion has no place in politics. Obama, on the other hand, is shrewd. He made that clear last week when he addressed an evangelical group and said that it was past the time when the donkeys could allow the elephants to assume that they owned the religious vote. He took the position that there was more than one kind of Christianity and that there was plenty of room for Christianity in what he called 'progressive' political issues. What was especially astute was his use of the historical importance of Christianity to monumental developments in American life and culture. Imagine, he asked, Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech without a reference to God, a force called upon in both instances to push down regimes held in place by bigotry - the system of plantation slavery and the redneck rule of segregation (which was unconstitutional, by the way)."

Exactly, and Sen. Obama's views are in the mainstream of black political and religious thought. Yet why so many black liberal Democrats allow white liberal Democrats to try to undermine part of the richness and contributions of black American culture - the role of religious tradition in politics and the providence of democracy to American society - with their typical contempt of religiosity is beyond me. And I am just a deist and, unlike Sen. Obama, not even a Christian.