The Obama Diaries

by Laura Ingraham

  Can we get a definition of “the Lord’s work” on aisle 666, please?

  It is true that Christianity has long taught that faith without works is dead. But similarly, works without faith are sterile. Obama believes that we have an obligation to help our fellow man—so long as we do so via a government agency or program or maybe a left-wing NGO. This is not the charity that God demands of us, nor does it qualify as faith-based. It is little more than social work in religious drag. But try explaining that to Joshua Dubois.

  Dubois heard the Messiah’s call and followed. After watching Obama’s convention speech, Dubois, an evangelical minister and grad student at Princeton, drove to Washington and offered his services to the senator from Illinois. He would eventually become Obama’s director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. But during the campaign, the twenty-five-year-old was in charge of religious outreach, trying to convince pastors, rabbis, imams, and priests to support his man.

  The “reverend” initiated a series of faith-based “home parties” in battleground states. At these religious Tupperware-style gatherings, Dubois tried to sell voters on Obama’s religiosity and dodge his problematic stances on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. He simultaneously launched “the Joshua Generation Project,” an outreach to young evangelical voters. Poverty, Darfur, and climate change were stressed as moral issues, while those secondary moral concerns like life and the future of the family were set aside.

  It worked like a charm. Obama racked up huge gains in the 2008 race among religious voters. Forty-three percent of regular churchgoers supported him and 57 percent of occasional pew sitters went his way. Fifty-four percent of the crucial Catholic swing vote also went for Obama, besting George W. Bush’s Catholic support by two percentage points. Once Obama seized victory, he promised to turn Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives into the moral center of his administration. He changed its name to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and quickly changed its focus.

  In a speech on July 1, 2008, Obama laid out his vision for the office that was originally founded to make it easier for religious groups to compete for federal contracts without forfeiting their identities. Obama said, “Religious organizations that receive federal dollars cannot discriminate with respect to hiring for government-funded social service programs.” This one line completely gutted the reason for having a faith-based initiative office in the first place. It essentially forces all faith groups into the shadows and out of the public square. They can either suppress their religious values or go out and raise money to do “the Lord’s work” in the private sector. And Obama quickly made that more difficult by reducing the tax deduction for charitable giving.

  The president had other plans for his faith-based office. It would now be entirely devoted to policy matters with four main priorities: working to reduce poverty, promoting fatherhood, reducing the need for abortion by preventing unintended pregnancies, and reaching out to Muslims while encouraging interreligious dialogue.

  When I first read this list of priorities, I found it stunning that the government and this administration, which has been so deaf to the concerns of believers, would take it upon themselves to instigate “interreligious dialogue.” This type of religious dialogue is usually initiated by spiritual leaders: the ecumenical patriarch, the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury— people who represent sizable numbers of religious believers. But for his fervently devoted followers, Barack Obama does almost rise to the level of religious guru.

  Twenty-five spiritual advisors were chosen by Obama to serve as his religious sounding board. The Faith-Based Advisory Council included everyone from the president of the Southern Baptist convention to Harry Knox, director of the Human Rights Campaign’s Religion and Faith program. (Knox famously called the pope a “discredited leader” for refusing to distribute condoms in Africa as a way to combat AIDS. According to Harvard researcher Dr. Edward Green, however, the pope was right, as condom distribution may have contributed to the spread of the disease.)

  It didn’t take long for the faith-based council to abandon any discussion of how to reduce abortions. Too many disputes arose. They might have actually come up with a plan to reduce abortions, but liberals feared that the entire approach demonized “the procedure.” A year after they began their work, in February 2010, the council failly issued its recommendations to the president. Whether Obama acts on any of their suggestions or has even read the report is anyone’s guess. What is clear is that a few of the Faith-Based Advisory Council members did not like what they saw.

  Frank Page, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a member of the council, told the Washington Post, “It’s been a mixed experience. For example, I serve on the fatherhood task force. That’s pretty low-hanging fruit. Who’s not going to want more responsible fathers? But even within that, you have to leave your faith at the door in a lot of these discussions. You can’t say here’s why fathers ought to do better, this is what encouragement comes from the Bible, how being a better father is a godly right and biblical thing to do. When you have twenty-five people from such a wide range, you’re virtually reduced to a neighborhood group of folk. . . . When the president launched his office, he talked about abortion reduction as one of his four priorities. That was very quickly taken off the table as something we’d deal with.”

  At least the Muslim outreach has been successful . . . that is, once you discount the Iranian nuke buildup, the rise in Somalian Islamism, and a growing Islamic homegrown threat.

  THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  February 12, 2010

  Valerie told me that Auntie Zeituni was evicted from another apartment today. That must have been why she was trying to reach me through the White House switchboard. I really wanted to give her a pep talk, maybe a few signed copies of Audacity and a couple of boxes of those presidential Jelly Bellies, but Giblet told me it wouldn’t be a good idea PR-wise.

  She will surely be deported now. But how would that look? The aunt of the most historic president of the United States being shipped back to her home country like a common criminal! When Rahm and I were having a smoke this evening, sitting at the picnic table, it came to me—why not turn lemonade into lemons? This is the mother (or aunt) of all immigration sob stories! When the time is right, we could arrange for her to be sent to an immigration holding center—those God-awful places where they keep aliens until they are deported. I know I could get someone like Anderson Cooper or Ann Curry to do a sympathetic story. We’d feed them all the details about what a sweet, lovely woman she is, how she loves America, and how it was all that confusing government paperwork that led to her problems. By the time my friends in the press get through with this story, immigration officials will end up looking like the heartless bastards that they are, while auntie is seen as the neighbor next-door (if you happen to live in a trailer park or subsidized housing, that is).

  This one sad tale can help me with the real goal—finding fifteen million more Obama voters before 2012! Amnesty, “a path to citizenship,” “comprehensive immigration reform” . . . it doesn’t matter to me what we call it. As long as these undocumented citizens get to the polls and vote for me, they can call it the Mexican line dance for all I care!

  In the meantime, I knew I had to get auntie some help. Like it says in the Book of Exorcist: “The power of my faith compels me.” So I placed a few calls to that immigration judge up in Boston and told him to grant her asylum—but to take his time doing it.

  Last week I sent Reggie to Boston to place auntie with one of the charity groups until the ruling is handed down. The first place they visited was an immigrant center run by the Catholic Church. They do all the paperwork for the immigrants, help them get jobs and housing—the whole shebang. Since the government gives that outfit $150 million a year in contracts, they’d better offer the whole shebang! The only problem is, Reggie said, they have crucifixes
in the hallways of this place. And he saw a picture of the pope hanging in one of the offices! That is simply unacceptable. Where is a portrait of their president?! The Catholics always use their social services to proselytize. But it didn’t work this time. Auntie and Reggie walked right out of there. (Soon as we get immigration reform passed, I’m going to make sure that we do something to get the Catholic Church in line—like remove its tax-exempt status!) Later Auntie and Reg went down to an evangelical church that provides aid and shelter to immigrants. The minute they sat down, Pastor Bob began quoting the Bible and asked if they were “saved.” Reggie answered, “If she was saved, she wouldn’t need your help.” (Reggie’s honesty is one of the many attractive things about the man.) He called me on his cell from the evangelical agency and asked how to proceed. I told him, “Forget it and hurry home. Take Auntie down to the YWCA and let her stay there. Better to be a little uncomfortable than to be harassed by those religious zealots.”

  THE FAITH OF HIS FATHERS (AND MOTHER)

  Barack Obama’s awkwardness with faith, his ambivalence, can be traced back to his upbringing. As I noted earlier in the book, if you want to know what a man believes, find out what his family believes.

  “I was not raised in a religious household,” Obama wrote in Time magazine in October 2006. “My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in Baptist and Methodist teachings as children, but religious faith never really took root in their hearts.” But in Dreams from My Father, he is even more blunt. Speaking of his grandfather, he writes: “In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. . . .

  “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty, and oppression in the cloak of righteousness,” Obama wrote in Time.

  This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology . . . I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part [emphasis added]—no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways—and not necessarily the best way—that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well [emphasis added].

  This is probably the best way to describe Barack Obama’s approach to religion. He treats it with a “suitable respect, but a suitable detachment as well.”

  High school friends of Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, told the Chicago Tribune, “She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she’d read about and could argue. She was always challenging and arguing and comparing.” Barack Obama, Sr., was also a confirmed atheist by the time he met Barry’s mother. Here, in his mother and father, are the roots of the doubt that Barack Obama always references when speaking of faith.

  Stanley Ann Dunham exposed her son Barack to religion the way one would expose a child to poisonous snakes—as a distant curiosity.

  THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  April 4, 2010

  On Friday, when I was busy campaigning for the health-care bill I already signed into law, Gibbopotomus told me that Easter was in two days and we really needed to hit a church given where I am in the polls. Since we were still getting grief for not going on Christmas, I reluctantly agreed.

  Awesome decision. Rahm and Susan Sher picked the Allen Chapel AME Church in Southeast Washington because it was a guaranteed friendly congregation and the area had suffered recently from terrible crime and high unemployment (the latter being Bush’s fault). Without a doubt, my presence was the beginning of the resurrection of this struggling community. The highlight of the service wasn’t the same old “He rose from the dead to cleanse us from our sins” claptrap. It came when the senior pastor, the Reverend Michael Bell, wrapped up his sermon by describing me as “the most debonair, the most suave president of this United States of America.” The congregation went nuts. The cheering went on so long that I felt like I was back in Grant Park on election night . . . or backstage with the folks at SNL.

  I see that the AP and the Washington Post already published great pieces on the Web about my hero’s welcome at Allen Chapel. Soon, like St. John the Baptist, I’ll be rising again . . . in the polls! I can feel it. Take that, Sean Hannity! Maybe this church thing isn’t such a time-suck after all.

  After college, Obama relocated to Chicago, where he took up community organizing: mobilizing people to boycott and strike against “power,” à la Saul Alinsky. Obama has often said, “It was a Catholic group called The Campaign for Human Development that helped fund the work I did many years ago in Chicago to help lift up neighborhoods that were devastated by the closure of a local steel plant.”

  Obama, the community organizer, was to bring black churches together to pressure business and government entities for change “in the community.” Many of the ministers he approached suggested that the young activist join a church. But as Obama (or more likely his unacknowledged co-author Bill Ayers) wrote in Dreams from My Father, “I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”

  Still, he was attracted to being a part of a community with historic roots and a strong sense of its own identity. “I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change . . . it understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.”

  For Obama, social activism became a sort of sacrament. The principal role of the church was not to reform or redeem the individual, but to deliver the community to some secular utopia in the here and now.

  “The historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world,” Obama wrote in Time magazine. “It was because of these newfound understandings—that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved—that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.”

  Obama’s choice of church and his decision to be baptized can best be described as an exercise in religious political opportunism. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church was located just outside Obama’s organizing district, so he could join the church and avoid offending any of the pastors he dealt with each day. Trinity United also had one of the most politically connected black congregations in Chicago—even Oprah had been a member. But without the zeal and fiery social justice proselytizing of its pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Trinity United would be just another predominantly black church in Chicago.

  Wright was the spiritual leader of choice for Chicago’s elite black community. Dressed in his glittery dashiki, he would rail against white power, the military, and the Jews, while supporting gay rights. Obama’s biographer, Christopher Anderson, writes that Wright promulgated an “Afrocentric, black liberation theology . . . Barack was intrigued by Wright’s message of black empowerment; the pastor’s rantings against the ‘white power’ structure in Washington and the state of Israel—not to mention his defense of Communists in Nicaragua and the Castro regime in Cuba—were met with a chorus of amens
every week, and fellow churchgoers remember that Barack chimed in with the rest.”

  It is safe to say that Jeremiah Wright, the man that Barack Obama identified as his “spiritual father,” had more influence over the future president and his thinking than anyone in his life. Once Obama determined that he needed a law degree to realize his political ambitions, Wright, and an array of radical Muslims and Alinsky acolytes, lobbied to get him into Harvard Law School. But even at Harvard, the guiding hand of Jeremiah Wright was never far away.

  For twenty years, Barack Obama not only bathed in the thought and perverse theology of Jeremiah Wright, but the cadence, the sound, the pulse of his oratory became part of Obama’s DNA. As the New York Times reported: “When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School . . . where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.”

  When you hear Obama on the stump, when he goes into campaign mode, a strange metamorphosis occurs. The measured, staccato Obama of the exclusive interviews vanishes, and out pops Obama the pastor. What you are hearing is the ghost of Jeremiah Wright.

  After Harvard, Barack Obama returned to Chicago. He was married by Reverend Wright, and later the pastor baptized his two daughters. Though Obama was forced to distance himself from his spiritual mentor in 2008 and repudiate his message for political reasons, the influence of Wright remains.