This is not a prediction about the success of the 44th President. Rather it is reminder that good intentions have paved a lot of roads upon which the nation does not need to travel.

1) Yes, I do like Barack Obama. But I am also capable of criticizing him, as I did after the infamous “bitter” comments in San Francisco. Here on The Immanent Frame, I faulted Obama for reducing the religious convictions of rural Pennsylvanians to economic deprivation.

2) To be sure, Barack Obama makes himself a central character in his own rhetoric, but so do many preachers and politicians. Frederick Buechner once wrote that “a minister has only two stories to tell. One is the story of Jesus. The other is his own story. Most ministers don’t dare tell their own stories—the ups and downs, the darks and lights.”

Barack Obama has dared to tell both kinds of stories. While unashamedly describing his decision to follow Jesus, he has presented his autobiography as a parable of racial reconciliation. Raised by a single white mother, he has built bridges between African Americans and whites like no other politician in recent times. For millions of Americans and much of the world, he is a symbol of a post-racial future (even though that future is decades away).

3) Like Pavlischek, I’m no fan of Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr is another story. Though I don’t buy everything Niebuhr wrote, I think his sober view of human nature can only be an asset to an Obama administration.

Because of his Niebuhrian instincts, Obama did a better job of answering Rick Warren’s question about evil than John McCain. As you recall, John McCain and some of his supporters identified evil primarily with “radical Islamic extremism.” By contrast, Obama raised the possibility that Americans may also be sinners. To my thinking, that sounds a lot closer to Solzhenitsyn’s observation that “the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”

Having said that, I am very nervous about the way that a segment of the evangelical community will respond to a President Obama. I don’t think we have good survey data on this matter right now. We may have to wait for a good General Social Survey/National Election Study item on Obama’s alleged Muslim identity or Obama’s perceived otherness.

I will say this: Evangelicals in the Missouri Ozarks (where I live) have expressed both civility and hostility towards Obama. Without good quantitative research it is hard to tell which is greater.

The large amount of money needed for modern political campaigns also requires political parties to get the faithful scared that if the other side wins, all hell will break loose. There is a built in incentive to find and publicize the extreme.

You can get some very extreme opinions on both sides (and have over the past few years). There is also a huge amount of diversity as group as large at conservative Protestants (about 30-35% of the US population) and you can find examples of almost everything, but it is dangerous to map those acecdotes onto the whole group (they were not sampled randomly, they were sampled to create a reaction).

If you do surveys of the American people or do qualitative interviews with them, most people (including Conservatives Christians) are not that extreme. While there may be statistically significant differences between conservative Protestants and others on voting behavior or attitudes, we do everyone a disservice if we impose of the most extreme fringe of either group as the representative for that group. It is like hearing a talk by Osama bin Laden and then thinking that represents Islam (or believing Islam).

The problem gets accentuated when people in the media/academia know very little about a particular group (i.e., have little personal experience with or sensitivity to them – which if you have looked at any survey about the people who are in the media or academia is clearly true) or when people already have disdain for them. There is plenty of extremism, hypocrisy, intolerance, stereotyping, and misinformation on the extremes of both/all sides.
When it is a group we belong to, we don’t hear the extremism as jarringly (and may believe some of it), we make excuses for it, we don’t advertise it to others, we forgive ourselves easily, and we differentiate ourselves from it (I didn’t do it, people like me don’t think/do that). When it is in another group, we notice it, put little work into trying to understand if the meanings they give match what we hear, spread it to others, do not forgive easily, and over-generalize comments or actions by a particular person to a much larger group. That is how conflicts like Northern Ireland, Palestine/Israel, etc. perpetuate and why Koreans and Chinese resent the Japanese for what they did during World War II, but most Japanese don’t feel responsible and feel like they were victims of World War II as well (they got bombed). We do not gather or process information about the other in the same way we do about ourselves. It takes intellectual and moral maturity to even work on that.
Sometimes I hope that academics would be better at recognizing the process of othering and stereotyping, see when they are being as bigoted as the people they criticize, but my experience over the last few months suggests just like most other people. No one has a monopoly on hypocrisy or intolerance. They is plenty of it in academia. If you need more proof of that, just think about the kind of squabbles we get into over hiring – particularly if a candidate has a different point of view/ideology.

I have to say that I support whichever side aligns itself with justice, so I am not partisan, but some of the opinions I’m hearing from sincere moral majority people (many of them fundamentalists) and from those who seems to have an irrational almost pathological fear of Obama as the next Hitler with his private army, or the makings of an anti-Christ (based I imagine on the misinformed notion that he is a Muslim), are cause for serious concern. These are not loopy red-necks, but in other domains, sensible, charitable, talented intelligent people – just on this one thing they have a mania for: seeing Obama brought down.

When questioned or asked to consider the possibility that there might be moderate muslims to whom Obama might be able to appeal and with whom he might be able negotiate for a more peaceful world, these people just about froth at the mouth, shouting such slogans as … ‘ that the Islamic religion is intrinsically violent’, ‘all Muslims hate the United States’ and ‘Obama is a Muslim’.

To me living so far away, it is difficult to form a firm opinion, but I am extremely concerned that so many on the right are so bigoted against Obama. Can anyone on the ground over there help to explain the strength of this feeling and from where it originates (other than the most obvious source – ignorance of the facts)?

I find it difficult to believe that people so well educated can be so determined not to be confused by the ‘facts’ – which if those facts oppose their stance, are automatically deemed to be playing into the hands of the ‘enemies of America’, the hand of the devil, or just symptomatic of plain unpatriotic behaviour.

What can be done? Will Obama be able to break through such a thick prejudice shield, and if not, what will be the consequence?