President Barack Obama stood before an audience of distinguished Christian clergy and lay leaders and took on the mantle of pastor in chief.
“I have to be careful,” he joked at the White House’s annual Easter prayer breakfast. “I am not going to stand up here and give a sermon. It’s always a bad idea to give a sermon in front of professionals.”
With that, he gave a sermon, telling the story of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane and his eventual crucifixion, a sacrifice that “puts in perspective our small problems relative to the big problems he was dealing with.”
Few presidents have spoken about their religious faith as often, as deeply or as eloquently as Obama. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states,” he declared at the 2004 Democratic convention, and he has sought since then to rebuild ties between the Democratic Party and the world of faith.
Yet no president has faced such sustained hostility over issues of faith, including Republican charges that he is waging a “war on religion,” widespread suspicion about the sincerity of his Christian faith and the persistent legend that he is a practicing Muslim.
More moderate groups have generally seen Obama’s record on faith issues in a much more favorable light. But even some of them have been upset by his administration’s handling of certain issues, most notably the decision — later modified — to require the insurance plans of many religiously affiliated institutions to cover contraception.
“We’re very, very concerned about that,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, which objected to the government deciding which religious groups qualified for an exemption from the rule.
Obama gets generally high marks from faith organizations for maintaining, and in some ways strengthening, the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships begun by President George W. Bush. Obama faced pressure from secular liberals to scuttle the office, which was seen as blurring the line between church and state. Instead, he used it to reach out to faith groups across a broad spectrum of theology and politics.
Under Joshua Dubois, a Pentecostal minister Obama appointed to head the office, it has expanded its focus from primarily funneling government contracts to faith-based groups to also engaging religious organizations as volunteers. It has, for instance, trained churches and other religious organizations in disaster preparedness and response. It also enlisted more than 1,000 churches in a Job Clubs program to help the unemployed.
A rather different message has emerged from the Republican presidential contest. “This president is attacking religion, and is putting in place a secular agenda that our forefounders would not recognize,” his likely Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, has said.
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have used stronger language. Gingrich has described Obama’s policies as “the most secular anti-religious bigotry that we’ve ever seen in a president,” and Santorum said Obama’s re-election would ensure that “the practice of your faith will be dictated by the federal government.”
The Republicans were referring primarily to one or more of several decisions.
One was the contraception mandate, which particularly offended the Roman Catholic Church. Obama’s compromise — having insurance companies provide the contraception without church involvement — did little to assuage Catholic bishops or other staunch critics, in part because the new rules did not grant a full exemption to religiously affiliated institutions, such as hospitals and schools, that primarily serve people of other faiths.
Such an exemption is “way too narrow,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which is on the liberal end of the theological and political spectrum. “I think that everyone from left to right should be deeply troubled.” Saperstein added that he was satisfied with the administration’s compromise but believed the controversy had needlessly shifted the discussion from women’s health to religious freedom.
Obama has also been criticized for a decision to deny a contract to the Catholic Church’s Migration and Refugee Services to help victims of sexual trafficking, apparently because the agency refused to counsel victims about access to contraception and abortion.
Perhaps no decision by the administration, however, has angered religious groups as much as its position in a relatively obscure case that came before the Supreme Court last year. The Hosanna-Tabor case involved an allegation that an Evangelical Lutheran school in Redford, Mich., had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by firing a teacher who was diagnosed with an apparently treatable form of narcolepsy, whose sufferers are prone to sudden sleeping spells.
Because the job was considered ministerial, the school said it could claim a “ministerial exception” from the act. Obama’s solicitor general seemed to suggest that no such exception existed in the Constitution — an idea that horrified religious leaders, even those who supported the administration’s case against the school.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of the school, with justices expressing outrage over the administration’s argument. Even Justice Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general under Obama, said she found it “amazing.”
Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who usually believes that Obama is too solicitous of religious groups, said he too found the administration’s position troubling. Taken to its logical conclusion, he said, it could require a Jewish congregation to interview Muslim and Christian clerics for a job as a rabbi.
“That one’s an outlier,” he said. “I don’t quite understand it.”
For all that, Lynn was among those who scoffed at the idea of Obama waging war on religion. “At most, it’s a pillow fight,” he said.
