As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors.

You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World).

The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.”

This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report.

As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru.

It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.”

Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections.

Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals.

Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness.

By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.

After hours of watching and reading, Lofton knows the answer. Oprah is a walking vowel, one that promises to encircle America with a message of hope, consumerism, and personal transformation.

Daring to tell a big story, Lofton uses Oprah to draw a map of popular religion in America. Criticizing the “pointillist profusions” that divide “our sects by geography,” she compares North American religion scholars to Borges’ cartographers “who, in their effort to map accurately the crevice of every mountain, created a map the size of the territory.”

Lofton’s Americanists sound a lot like the scholars in Ozarks Studies, a tiny subfield focused on a region straddling the South and the Midwest. Instead of mapping the American empire, we focus on 93 counties in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In an effort to chart the cultural geography and social history of every hill and valley, we sometimes forget that “map is not territory.” Asking “Is the Ozarks is, or are the Ozarks are?” we share her love of word play.

O is for Oprah. O is for Ozarks. Can the second embrace the first? Though Lofton stays away from the issue of audience reactions, it is an intriguing question.

Dubbed an “Evangelical Epicenter” by the Patchwork Nation project, my Ozarks county is a long way from Oprah’s Chicago studio. Seventy percent Republican, it is more likely to identify with Sarah Palin. During Palin’s 2009 book tour, the local Borders turned her S into a dollar sign, registering some of the best advance sales in the chain. As fate would have it, Palin was fresh from an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Comparing her Ozarks audience with the citizens of Wasilla, Alaska, she announced, “They are me.” One year earlier, a columnist for the Ozarks Christian News proclaimed, “I am Sarah Palin.”

And yet there is much in Winfrey’s background that resonates with Ozarkers. For starters, she grew up Baptist. In an area with nearly 150 Baptist congregations, that counts for something. Part of Oprah’s “Christian preamble,” this “previously Protestant” identity seeps into the content of her media persona. According to Lofton, “Despite the sense of some that she may indeed be the Antichrist, the work of Oprah and the work of an evangelical in the last decades of the twentieth century are not so dissimilar.”

Many Ozarkers are not so sure. Criticizing Winfrey’s association with the New Age movement, an article in the Ozarks Christian News concludes with a quote from Chuck Norris: “Every time I see her on TV, I think of how the devil disguises himself as an angel of light.”

Norris may be on to something. In “The Social History of Satan,” religion scholar Elaine Pagels traces the origins of Christian demonology to conflicts within first and second century Judaism. Breaking away from the wider Jewish community, some early Christians used Satan to mark the boundary between us and them. According to Pagels, the devil symbolized the “intimate enemy.”

By simultaneously drawing on and departing from American evangelicalism, Oprah has become the intimate enemy, entering the home through the electronic hearth. According to Lofton, “Oprah is all of it and none of it: celebrity and everywoman, corporate chairwoman and smart shopper, black woman and white woman, straight and queer, religious and spiritual, megachurch and shopping mall, seminarian and psychologist.”

To be sure, Ozarkers identify with many of these Oprahs. In an ethnographic study of a local megachurch, Missouri State graduate student Joseph Dutko uncovered a recurring catch phrase: “the best is yet to come.” Echoing Winfrey’s “Live Your Best Life,” this Pentecostal congregation is not far from the kingdom of Oprah. Likewise, Gannett-owned Ozarks Mom Like Me includes a “my favorite stuff” page modeled after The Oprah Magazine’s list of “things we think are just great.”

Lofton notes the genealogy of Winfrey’s spirituality in the nineteenth-century metaphysical movement. This tradition is alive and well in the “holy hills of the Ozarks.” In his chronicle of religion and tourism, Aaron Ketchell documents the presence of nature spirituality in early twentieth-century Branson. While the proprietors of Marvel Cave (now the site of a theme park) articulated a mystical view of the physical world, Kewpie doll creator Rose O’Neill told tales of fairies and fauns. More recently, groups like Unity and the School of Metaphysics have flourished in the area. According to the Springfield News-Leader, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret flew off the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble, thanks in no small part to Oprah’s endorsement. In 2007, Christ Church Unity screened the film version of the book.

Will Oprah’s O come to encircle the Evangelical Ozarks? It is hard to say.

Trafficking in stereotypes, a local blogger detects a “fear of Oprah” among white, middle-aged “talk radio guys,” noting that “some have even said she has scary beliefs.” In an effort to taunt such Oprahphobic men, she has composed a song: “Oprah is gonna get you, get you, Oprah is gonna get you, you’ll wet yourself in a fright.”

Not surprisingly, serious reservations accompanied Oprah’s involvement in presidential politics. Despite the existence of the Missouri-based “Rednecks for Obama” (a duo that actively subverted a stereotype), McCain/Palin had no trouble winning the region. Oprah’s chosen one was not the choice of the Ozarks.

On the other hand, Oprah has been embraced in some unlikely quarters. First, the Ozarks’ number one tourist attraction has trumpeted an endorsement from Oprah.com: “Smack dab in the middle of the country, this 1880s theme park offers world-class festivals, live shows and thrilling rides for all ages.” It also features Southern Gospel music and the Veggie Tales.

Second, Oprah’s vision of consumerist multiculturalism may have found a home in Northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart has embraced the rhetoric of diversity. As Marjorie Rosen argues in Boom Town, a once “tiny Bible Belt community” is changing “into a diverse society like that which we find in our big cities.”

Last but not least, Oprah has become “the other woman” for at least one Ozarks male: Larry Van Ness, of Springfield, Missouri. According to Oprah’s web site, “Every afternoon, Larry settles into a barber chair in his garage and watches the show.” In 2010, Oprah invited him to the premier of her final season, using NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson to deliver the message.

Though Lofton did not focus on the reception of Oprah’s gospel, it is a fruitful area for future research. Big enough to encompass the Charlotte Motor Speedway and the MO-Kan Dragway, the O has a future in Red State America. As Lofton is eager to point out, there is a wideness in Oprah’s mercy.

Somewhat more surprising is the inclusion of two historians, members of a discipline that has largely ignored Taylor’s book. Three years after its publication, A Secular Age has yet to be reviewed in the Journal of American History or the American Historical Review.

What explains this lack of interest? Writing in Church History, Martin Marty notes that, while “the ordinary historian has very much to learn from Taylor’s use of history,” it cannot be appropriated “without undertaking a significant act of translating and organizing the material.”

Part of the problem lies in the top-down nature of Taylor’s account, an issue noted by historian Jon Butler in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. According to Butler, “Taylor seldom invokes the experiences of ordinary people,” relying instead on secondary accounts. Criticizing Taylor’s focus on intellectual history, Butler draws on a deep knowledge of colonial American religion, noting that eighteenth-century observers found a combination of belief and unbelief. Together with recent scholarship on medieval and early modern Europe, such accounts challenge Taylor’s tendency to dichotomize the sacred and the secular.

Echoing Butler, historian Jonathan Sheehan questions the use of history in Taylor’s book. Frustrated with its account of an enchanted golden age, Sheehan doubts whether it is possible to know when the purported disenchantment of the world actually took place.

And yet scholars ignore this question at their peril.

In his chapter for Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, theologian John Milbank writes of “Bible Belt fundamentalists, who live in a secularized space and time far more extreme than anything found in Europe.” Here in the “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” we are well aware of the evangelicalism Milbank describes. One only has to look as far as Wal-Mart to see the blend of consumer capitalism and Protestant discipline prophesied by Max Weber. At the same time, there is more to this part of America than civil religion and “family values,” though both can be found in abundance in Branson, Missouri.

Take, for example, Good Friday, which recently passed, a day that, Taylor notes, “was important, not only for the theologically orthodox reason, but because the power it carried made it a good day for planting crops, and enabled hot cross buns to save houses from fire.”  On such occasions, the residents of pre-modern Europe participated in what Taylor calls “higher times.”

Though Taylor and Milbank relegate such “church magic” to old Europe, similar practices could be found in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks as recently as the 1930s. In Ozark Superstitions (published in 1947 by Columbia University Press), folklorist Vance Randolph notes that people “who used to raise hemp for cordage—the same weed that is called marijuana by the moderns—say that this stuff is best planted on Good Friday. Flax must be planted on Good Friday no matter what the weather conditions, according to the old settlers.”

Such folk practices give new meaning to the term “higher times.” They also cast doubt on Taylor’s narrative of disenchantment. Butler says as much in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, noting that Taylor gives inadequate coverage to the mixture of Christian and non-Christian magic in European history.

Focusing on twentieth-century Appalachia, historian Richard J. Callahan documents the persistence of such beliefs in Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields. Discussing the role of religion in everyday life, he describes how residents used the signs of the Zodiac to govern sowing and reaping, justifying such practices with appeals to both the Bible and the farmer’s almanac.

Too often, chroniclers of Ozark and Appalachian religion have dismissed such practices as the outmoded lifestyles of “our contemporary ancestors,” confined to the “most deliberately unprogressive people in the United States.” Such crude narratives are a version of what Taylor calls “subtraction stories,” emphasizing the disappearance of pre-modern beliefs in the face of progress and science.

Though I doubt many of my neighbors planted hemp on Good Friday, the fact that some twentieth-century Americans continue to experience higher times is relevant to the discussion of A Secular Age.  At the very least, such revelations deserve a footnote in this epic story of religion and modernity.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

“These things are old. These things are true.” With these words, Barack Obama reaffirmed America’s commitment to “those values upon which our success depends”: hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.

At first glance, these seem like strange words for a Democratic president to be uttering. By invoking the old and the true, Obama appeared to be channeling the late Russell Kirk, the godfather of conservative intellectuals and the “champion of the permanent things.” In a 1987 lecture, Kirk said a conservative is a person “who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.” In the judgment of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, the young president “intends to use conservative values for progressive ends.”

Yet Obama’s vision for America does not resemble Kirk’s list of “Ten Conservative Principles,” which includes such ideals as prescription, restraint, and property rights.  While the president’s admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr might lead him to embrace the “principle of imperfectability,” Kirk’s juxtaposition of “voluntary community” with “involuntary collectivism,” would strike Obama as a false choice.

Nor does Obama’s catalogue of virtues match the post-war sociological best-sellers on the “American character.” From The Lonely Crowd to Habits of the Heart, sociologists have grappled with the tension between community and individualism. Though this dialectic is certainly present in Obama’s Inaugural Address, it does not dominate his list of values. To be sure, there is some overlap with the American core values identified by Robin Williams, Jr. in 1956 and cited by sociology textbooks ever since: achievement and success, activity and work, moral orientation, humanitarian mores, efficiency and practicality, progress, material comfort, equality, freedom, external conformity, science and rationality, nationalism-patriotism, democracy, individual personality, and racism. By celebrating success, honesty, hard work and patriotism, Obama affirmed several of these values. Likewise, by mentioning fair play, he echoed Bill Clinton’s praise of those “who work hard and play by the rules.”

One has to look elsewhere in the speech for the two values most often identified with the American creed: equality and freedom. Earlier in his address, Obama invoked the “God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” Later he expounded on the “meaning of our liberty and our creed.”

Like many civil religious speeches, Barack Obama’s address melded the biblical and the republican traditions. While quoting St. Paul’s admonition to “put away childish things,” he appealed to the civic virtues of Greece and Rome. In recent years, some have called for a return to the “pagan ethos” of Sparta, highlighting the incompatibility of Jewish and Christian morality with a Machiavellian ethic of “self-preservation.” In a thoughtful essay, James Skillen critiques such works, including Robert Kaplan’s Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, arguing that it is possible to reconcile national service with Christian discipleship. By praising the virtues of courage and patriotism alongside the heritage of Biblical faith, Barack Obama signaled that he agrees. Though such rhetoric may not satisfy Christian pacifists or American Spartans, it is to be expected from a commander in chief who is also a person of faith. It is also well within the tradition of presidential rhetoric.

While Obama’s speech draws on a host of political traditions, the question remains: how did the president-elect come up with this particular list of values?

We know that Obama’s chief speechwriter Jon Favreau played a key role in drafting the Inaugural Address. Given Favreau’s education at the Jesuit-sponsored College of the Holy Cross, it is easy to imagine him drawing on the rhetoric of America’s first Catholic president. The fact that Favreau admires the speeches of Robert Kennedy makes this hypothesis somewhat plausible. Indeed, one could hear echoes of both the civic (“Ask not what your country can do for you“) and the visionary (“Space is open to us now“) sides of John F. Kennedy when Barack Obama linked patriotism and curiosity. The same goes for Obama’s promise to “restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders.”

Obama’s rhetoric also resonates with some deep currents in American popular culture. As any fanboy knows, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” In recent months, comic book stores have been overrun by demands for Marvel’s “Spidey Meets the President.” Even before this special issue, Obama was a fan of the webbed wall crawler. Though it is unlikely that Stan Lee’s Jewish humanism influenced the Inaugural Address, at least one citizen interpreted Obama’s call for a “new era of responsibility” in the language of Spiderman. Commenting on a New York Times blog, one reader wrote that the president “discussed the idea that with great power comes a sense of great responsibility, not the sense that you can do what you want.”

Along the same lines, Entertainment Weekly reported that President Obama enjoys watching SpongeBob with his daughters. This is appropriate given the warm welcome Obama’s denomination gave to the cartoon character back in 2005. When Focus on the Family criticized the use of “popular animated personalities” to “promote the acceptance of homosexuality among our nation’s youth,” the United Church of Christ released the following statement: “Jesus’ message of extravagant welcome extends to all, including SpongeBob Squarepants—the cartoon character that has come under fire for allegedly holding hands with a starfish.” Such radical hospitality has its roots in the tradition of liberal Protestantism.  Whatever their source, Obama’s tolerant instincts are a good fit for a nation that has tired of the culture wars.

A more relevant question is whether Barack Obama ever read The Book of Virtues to Sasha and Malia. Though there is no evidence that he ever did, there are striking parallels between William Bennett’s book and Obama’s speech. Six out of the ten virtues listed in Bennett’s table of contents were mentioned in the Inaugural Address (responsibility, hard work, courage, honesty, loyalty, and faith). This apparent consensus confirms the centrality of these qualities to the American character. It also shows the extent to which progressives have adopted the rhetoric of conservatives. In an administration that is working hard to bridge the divide between Red and Blue, everything old is new again.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

Many scholars are unaware of the religious underpinnings of the Declaration. In A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon (who is concluding her service as U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See) uncovers the influence of Catholic social thought on this historic document. According to Glendon, certain phrases “have a familiar ring to persons acquainted with the social encyclicals.” Recognizing this connection, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace held a public commemoration of the anniversary attended by Pope Benedict XVI.  In the United States, many Catholics celebrated the legacy of what Pope John Paul II called “one of the highest expressions of the human conscience in our time.” While some liberal Catholics used the occasion to protest the hierarchy’s opposition to gay rights, they have largely shared the Vatican’s support for the Universal Declaration.

By contrast, many evangelicals let the Declaration’s anniversary pass without notice.  A Google News search for the words “evangelical” and “Universal Declaration” yielded just six stories (compared to 133 for “Catholic” and “Universal Declaration”).  While the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today have given increasing attention to human rights (going so far as to cite the Declaration in the past), no mention of the anniversary could be found on their websites.

Why have evangelicals ignored the birthday of the twentieth century’s most profound statement on human rights?  One reason may be evangelical ambivalence about the United Nations. Another may be that some evangelicals regard “rights talk” as an alien language with little connection to Biblical faith.  Raised in the evangelical subculture, I have experienced this attitude firsthand. During my undergraduate years at Wheaton College, one of my professors presented the class with a startling claim:  human rights are a product of modern political thought and cannot be found in the Bible. At the time, I wondered how he could square this statement with the dozens of Bible verses proclaiming the rights of the poor.

In Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Yale University philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a devastating critique of the historical narrative employed by my professor. Drawing on the work of historians Brian Tierney and John Witte, Jr., Wolterstorff argues that the “conception of justice as inherent rights was not born in the fourteenth century or the seventeenth century.” Debunking the notion that natural rights are the outgrowth of philosophical nominalism and the European Enlightenment, he pronounces this narrative “indisputably false.”

Along the way, Wolterstorff critiques the notion that rights talk is an offshoot of modern individualism.  Questioning Stanley Hauerwas’ claim that the language of rights “underwrites a view of human relations as exchanges,” he presents an account of justice that is irreducibly communal. Wolterstorff also takes on those philosophers who would ground their accounts of justice in the classical Greek and Roman descriptions of the well-lived life.  In his judgment, such approaches fail to take into account the inherent worth of human beings.

Rather than treating rights as a modern invention, Wolterstorff traces them back to the early church fathers and the Bible itself. Noting the prominence of the “quartet of the vulnerable” throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, he sees the protection of “widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor” as central to the biblical text. Criticizing those who would “de-justicize” the New Testament, he contends it “is all about justice.” Citing the focus of the Gospels on “lifting up those at the bottom,” Wolterstorff celebrates Jesus of Nazareth’s “expanded vision of the downtrodden.”

Will Wolterstorff’s Biblically-grounded account of justice sway those evangelicals who are allergic to rights talk?  It is possible it will.  Though most laypersons and clergy will not read this book, its rehabilitation of rights may filter down through evangelical colleges and seminaries. Thanks to Wolterstorff, it will be harder for evangelical faculty to dismiss rights as an Enlightenment creation.

As Allen Hertzke documents in Freeing God’s Children, some evangelicals have embraced the global struggle for human rights. Though initially interested in securing the religious freedoms of fellow believers, they have widened their focus to include the campaign against genocide in Darfur and the fight against human sex trafficking in Asia. Whether such evangelical activism represents a new wing of the religious left or the globalization of religious conservatism remains to be seen.  Given Wolterstorff’s history of opposition to the Vietnam War, apartheid, torture, and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it is clear that his sympathies lie with the former. Despite these political commitments, he has managed to win the respect of many conservatives.

Wolterstorff may have a harder time convincing secular readers that the “incursion of Scripture into the thought world of late antiquity made possible the rights culture that we are all familiar with.” In the final chapters of the book, he asserts that it may not be possible to provide a secular grounding for human rights, critiquing the attempts of Immanuel Kant, Ronald Dworkin, and Alan Gewirth to do just that. According to Wolterstorff’s 2007 lecture to the American Academy of Religion, “the only adequate grounding is a theistic grounding which holds that each and every human being bears the image of God and is equally loved by God.” Like political philosopher Glenn Tinder’s 1989 Atlantic article, “Can We Be Good Without God?” Wolterstorff’s argument may resonate more with people of faith than with secular scholars.

The fact that Princeton University Press was able to secure a positive blurb from New School philosopher Richard J. Bernstein suggests Wolterstorff may have a shot at influencing the wider conversation about rights. Calling Wolterstorff’s study “the most impressive book on justice since Rawls’ A Theory of Justice,” Bernstein writes that even “those who are skeptical about his theistic grounding of justice will be challenged by the clarity, rigor, and thoroughness of his arguments.”  From 1997 to 1999, Bernstein was a participant in the Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education, co-directed by Wolterstorff and historian James Turner. Composed of twenty-eight members from across the humanities and social sciences, it was an opportunity for secular and religious scholars to engage in serious conversation about issues of faith and meaning.  Written in the same spirit of civility, Wolterstorff’s Justice is another effort to bridge the gap between secular and religious understandings of public life.

On the one hand, an event starring two Protestant ministers cannot begin to capture the diversity of twenty-first century American religion.  Like Franklin Graham and Kirbyjon Caldwell before him, Rick Warren prayed in the name of Jesus.  Though he went out of his way to use the Arabic and Hebrew words for Jesus (“Isa” and “Yeshua”), such language is too close to the rhetoric of Jews for Jesus to sit well with Jewish audiences.  In an era when inaugural prayers have grown more Protestant, his use of the Lord’s Prayer was a sign of the Re-Christianization of American civil religion.

On the other hand, Warren did something that no evangelical figure has ever done on a national stage.  Appropriating a phrase from the Koran, he called God “the compassionate and merciful one.” Coming from a religious community that is deeply suspicious of Islam, Warren’s use of Koranic language was a bold move.  Though his use of the Jewish Shema (“Here O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”) was less risky, it was another gesture of inclusion.

Evoking more emotion than Warren’s prayer, Aretha Franklin’s performance was shining moment for American civil religion. The daughter of Detroit pastor and activist C.L. Franklin, she brought the look and sound of the black church into the inaugural festivities.  Her hat alone conjured up images of Baptist and Pentecostal crowns on Sunday morning. Like Ray Charles’ rendition of “America the Beautiful,” Franklin’s gospel-inflected “America” proved that old songs can be sung in new ways.

Echoing Franklin, poet Elizabeth Alexander used the metaphor of music to articulate a new vision for American society.  Urging her audience to “sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of,” she recapitulated the American story in verse.  Were Walt Whitman there to witness it, he would hear America singing.

The voices of African Americans also reverberated in the Reverend Joseph Lowery’s benediction.  Quoting from the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Lowery began, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way.” Like George W. Bush’s 2003 quotation from “Power in the Blood,” this was coded language.

By finding “wonder-working power” in the “goodness and idealism and faith of the American people,” Bush substituted national greatness for “the blood of the lamb.” By contrast, Lowery’s prayer did not fundamentally alter the meaning of “Life Every Voice.”  By weaving it into his benediction, Lowery brought the spirituality of the black church into a national ceremony.  Echoing the pacifism of Dr. King, he challenged the nation to embrace the radical message of the Hebrew prophets, asking God’s blessing on those who work “for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.”

Mixing realism and hope, Barack Obama did his part to renew American civil religion.  At a difficult moment in the nation’s history, the new president appealed to what Samuel Huntington once called the “American creed.” In his 1981 book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Huntington argued that times of crisis and turmoil evoke new bursts of “creedal passion.”

Such passion was on display in Obama’s inaugural address.  Noting that “every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms,” he acknowledged a “nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable.” Yet he did not stop there, urging a return to America’s ideals as the solution to America’s ills.  Articulating the core tenets of America’s creed, he argued that the “time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

Like Elizabeth Alexander, he retold the history of America, praising those who “toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.” Singling out immigrants, farmers, workers, and soldiers, Obama called on Americans to emulate their sacrifices. He also commended the heroes of 9/11, praising “the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke,” in what sounded like a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising.”

Consistent with previous moments of creedal passion, the incoming president called attention to the gap between America’s ideals and its institutions (what Huntington called the “IvI gap”). Criticizing the “greed and irresponsibility” of some, he blamed the weakening of the economy on “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” Condemning American unilateralism, Obama called for “sturdy alliances” with other nations, arguing that “our power alone cannot protect us.” Questioning the false choice “between our safety and our ideals,” Obama pledged his commitment to the “rule of law and the rights of man.”

The son of an African immigrant from Kenya and a white anthropologist from Kansas, Barack Obama cannot help but embody a new phase in American civil religion. Having lived in Hawaii, Indonesia, New York, and Chicago, he has experienced the impact of globalization firsthand.  Praising the “patchwork heritage” of America, Obama noted we “are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers . . . shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth.” Noting his own African roots, he reached out “to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born.”

It remains to be seen whether Obama’s administration can narrow the gap between American ideals and American institutions.  Whether he succeeds or fails, Obama will almost certainly expand the scope of American civil religion.  Based on the events of Tuesday’s inauguration, it appears that he already has.

Hidden from most of the electorate, Obama’s theological inclinations are well known to scholars of American religion. Heralding a “civil religious revival,” sociologist R. Stephen Warner cites Obama’s belief in the power of ideals to draw Americans “toward their better natures” and the “awesome God that he knows is worshiped in both blue and red states.” Philip Gorski articulates a similar argument on The Immanent Frame, pointing to the prominence of racial reconciliation in Obama’s religious speech.

Warner and Gorski are right to focus on the motif of reconciliation. From Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic convention to Tuesday’s victory speech in Grant Park, he has sought to heal the divisions between right and left, religious and secular, Red and Blue. Like the “Rednecks for Obama” bumper stickers in the Missouri Ozarks, Obama’s claim to “worship an awesome God in the blue states,” transcends the polarizations of American culture.

In the classic typology of literary genres, Obama’s vision of reconciliation could be described as comic.  As Northrop Frye writes in Anatomy of Criticism, “the theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it.” In Barack Obama’s case, the central character is often Barack Obama. In his landmark speech on race, Obama called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” Rather than disowning the Reverend Wright and his white grandmother, he portrayed them as integral to his sense of self.  As he told the audience in Philadelphia, “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Comic rhetoric also saturates The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s bestselling chronicle on remaking America.  Proposing “a new kind of politics,” he suggests “how we might move beyond our divisions,” praising those who have been able to “make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.”  At its heart, such rhetoric is implicitly theological.  According to Hayden White, the trope of comedy “suggests the possibility of liberation” from the effects of the Fall.  In Obama’s case, such comic sensibilities are rooted in the theological virtue of hope.

Filled with comic hope, Obama’s public theology is also self-consciously ironic, drawing on the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.  Part of a “Niebuhr revival” in American politics, Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.”  In an interview with David Brooks, Obama summarized Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, accepting “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world,” and that “we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.”

Most of the time, politicians apply Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought to foreign policy, where it is associated with the realist school of international relations. This is certainly true for Obama, who believes in the judicious use of American power.

Yet Niebuhr’s Christian realism may be even more useful on the domestic front.  In his quest to unify Americans, Obama should remember that even virtuous crusades can have unintended consequences. Though he entered presidential politics to heal the nation’s political divisions, it is possible that his election may exacerbate them.

While Barack Obama has high approval ratings, a minority of Americans continue to fear and loathe him. According to Wednesday’s USA Today/Gallup poll, 27 percent of the country is afraid of an Obama presidency.  Pre-election polls in Kentucky and Texas found that between 14 and 23 percent of the public believes he is a Muslim (and many of those people associate Islam with evil).

Before and after the election, the religious right has been unrelentingly hostile to an Obama candidacy.  In particular, recent statements by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson reveal an unbridgeable chasm between Obama and some conservatives. In October 2008, Dobson released what he called a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America.” A fictional letter from the future, it begins with the author lamenting the fact that he “can hardly sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ any more.” Downright apocalyptic, it warns that an Obama administration will result in the outlawing of campus ministries, a rise in pornography, the banning of evangelical books, and the outlawing of the Pledge of Allegiance. Along the same lines, Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery compares Barack Obama to “pagan rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, and Cyrus.” Such polarizing rhetoric suggests Obama may have trouble transcending the politics of Red States and Blue States.

And yet it appears that Obama knows exactly what he is up against.  Consistent with his Niebuhrian sensibilities, he has not portrayed the quest for reconciliation as an easy journey. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama believes that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that a new kind of politics requires us “to account for the darker aspects of our past.”

On Tuesday night, Obama looked back to a dark time in American history, quoting Abraham Lincoln’s words “to a nation far more divided than ours”:  We are not enemies but friends.

James Dobson notwithstanding, there are signs that religious conservatives are beginning to get the message. Though more evangelicals voted for Barack Obama than for John Kerry, an overwhelming majority supported John McCain.  Knowing this about his flock, Assemblies of God General Superintendent George Wood issued a post-election statement.  Noting that “we are to show respect for those who hold office,” he said that “the recent campaign at all levels and all parties was often filled with bitter rancor, distortions, smears and lies.” According to Wood, we must “set a better tone for the national discussion.” Though such words are all too rare, they suggest that Barack Obama may yet achieve his dream of a new kind of politics.

While Palin eschews the Pentecostal label, she spent her youth in a congregation affiliated with the Assemblies of God. Though Palin joined a non-Pentecostal church in 2002, she has maintained close ties to the movement, attending the AG-affiliated Juneau Christian Center when in Alaska’s capital city. In June of 2008, Governor Palin spoke at a graduation ceremony at her childhood church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Captured in a pair of videos available on You Tube, the overtly supernatural language used by Palin and Pastor Ed Kalnins has evoked fear and incomprehension in progressive journalists and bloggers. Zeroing in on the parts of the video that connect divine intervention with the state of Alaska, they have scrutinized Palin’s prayer for a $30 billion natural gas pipeline, as well as Kalnins’ claim that Alaska will be a “refuge state” during the coming apocalypse. Also raising eyebrows is the governor’s relationship with an African cleric linked to an anti-witchcraft crusade. This past June, Palin recalled how Bishop Thomas Muthee prayed over her, calling his words “bold” and “awesome.” A 2005 video shows Muthee laying hands on Palin, praying that “every form of witchcraft . . . will be rebuked in the name of Jesus.”

While Sarah Palin’s connection to Bishop Muthee is indisputable, other claims about her religious background are far more speculative. Playing a Pentecostal version of the Kevin Bacon game, some have linked Palin to such controversial movements as the Latter Rain of the 1940s and the so-called Third Wave. Because the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement remains a loose network of congregations, parachurch groups, and denominations, this connect-the-dots approach reveals some interesting associations. What it does not show is how much Governor Palin has internalized the beliefs and ideologies of these movements and leaders. This past June, Palin said, “There’s been so many words, Ed, over the state of Alaska,” implying that she shared Pastor Kalnins’ belief in Alaska’s prophetic destiny. Yet Palin left the Wasilla Assembly of God in 2002, three years into Kalnins’ pastorate.  It is unclear whether she was comfortable with the new direction he was taking the church.

Research by the sociologist Margaret Poloma suggests that the sorts of religious phenomena that have worried progressive bloggers are relatively uncommon in the Assemblies of God. According to a 1999 survey only a minority of AG pastors have “regularly experienced prophecy, healing, deliverance” or other dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Over eighty percent have never or rarely experienced holy laughter. While these findings say nothing about Palin or the churches she has attended, they suggest that anxiety over Pentecostalism in American culture is somewhat misplaced.

Lost in the discussion of Sarah Palin’s religion is an appreciation for the diversity of American Pentecostalism, past and present. After hearing Palin talk about the Iraq war and her soldier son, it is jarring to read a 1917 resolution from the Assemblies of God defending conscientious objectors. Noting the incompatibility of military service with Pentecostal faith, it states: “Scriptures such as ‘follow peace with all men,’ ‘resist not evil,’ ‘thou shalt not kill,’ or ‘love your enemies’ had ‘always been accepted and interpreted by our churches as prohibiting Christians from shedding blood or taking life.’” During World War I Pentecostal pacifists were investigated by the federal government and harassed by their fellow citizens. Though such radicalism faded in the face of nationalist pressures, it lives on in the witness of the Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship.

More enduring is the relationship between African-American Pentecostalism and movements for equality and social justice. Few Americans know that Martin Luther King’s last speech took place on the platform of a Pentecostal church. When King went up to the mountaintop he was speaking from the pulpit of Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, the final resting place of Bishop C.H. Mason, the founder of black America’s largest Pentecostal body. Fewer still know that the 2008 Democratic National Convention was organized by Pentecostal minister Leah Daughtry. Together with Barack Obama’s faith outreach coordinator Joshua DuBois she has combined progressive politics with black Pentecostalism (including a dash of liberation theology). Though some African-American Pentecostals have gravitated to the prosperity gospel and the new Christian right, most remain committed to the values of racial equality and economic justice. Some even work as community organizers.

Few Americans know about the interracial origins of the Pentecostal movement. At a time when white and black churches had little contact with each other, the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 brought together both races under one roof. So unprecedented was this mixing that one observer wrote that “the color line has been washed away in the blood.” Scholarly treatments of early Pentecostalism have warned against romanticizing the racial harmony of this era. Though the early years of the movement “saw a remarkable degree of interracial fraternity,” Pentecostalism never achieved complete integration. In the late 1920s, white Pentecostal pioneer Charles Fox Parham became a public advocate of the Ku Klux Klan. By that time, the movement had divided into two racially homogeneous camps. While whites flocked to the Assemblies of God (formed in 1914), the once biracial Church of God in Christ became a black denomination.

Although whites and blacks seldom worshipped together, a pattern of interracial influence continued to shape Pentecostalism, and by extension, American popular culture. As Paul Harvey notes in Freedom’s Coming, “the Azusa Street revivals spun off a corps of black and white evangelists who spread the new gospel and encouraged cultural interchange in religious settings.” Such mutual borrowing was especially apparent in gospel music, where “two streams of musical religious culture traveled beside each other, never merging, but often intersecting.” In the world of black popular music innumerable musical innovators came from Pentecostal backgrounds, including Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Little Richard, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Together with white Pentecostals Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis (who borrowed liberally from African-American sources) they helped reinvent American popular song.

Though such racial interchange had a profound impact on worship and music, Pentecostal voters have remained racially split. In the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape survey 45 percent of Pentecostals in predominantly white denominations identified with the Republican Party, compared to just 23 percent of those in black Pentecostal bodies. Though Pentecostals in white denominations are somewhat less Republican than other white evangelicals, they are far more conservative than their black co-religionists.

In the decades ahead an influx of Latino, Asian-American, and African Pentecostals promises to reshape Sarah Palin’s childhood denomination. In 1999 ethnic churches made up 26.8 percent of all Assemblies of God congregations, up from 21.8 percent in 1993. By 2030, only 50 percent of AG churches will have a white majority. While the number of white congregations has steadily decreased, the number of ethnic churches continues to grow. Without an infusion of Latino, Asian, and black congregations, the AG would be facing a decline in membership.

In the final analysis, the diversification of formerly white denominations may end up pushing Pentecostalism in a more moderate direction. Though somewhat more Republican than Latino Catholics, Latino Pentecostals are not as conservative as their Anglo brothers and sisters. In 2006 a majority of Hispanic evangelicals gave their votes to the Democrats. Currently, Latino Protestants are leaning toward Obama, suggesting that the demographic changes in the Assemblies of God may bode well for the Democratic Party. Bishop Muthee’s support for Sarah Palin notwithstanding, the influence of global Pentecostalism may move the American electorate to the left.

At the time, Obama’s speech was hailed by evangelicals and others as a model of religious political engagement. While Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. (a liberal Catholic with communitarian leanings) called it “a road map for Democrats struggling to speak authentically to people of faith,” the evangelical flagship Christianity Today acknowledged that “Democratic Senator Barack Obama gets it mostly right.”

That wasn’t the reaction Focus on the Family’s James Dobson had this summer after hearing the speech for the first time. Taking particular offense at the speech’s juxtaposition of him with the Reverend Al Sharpton, Dobson used his June 24, 2008 radio program to respond, criticizing Obama for acting “as though he’s some kind of biblical authority.” Dobson associate Tom Minnery went further, accusing Obama of “dragging biblical interpretation through the gutter.” In the speech, Obama had pointed out the challenges of applying the Bible to contemporary America, arguing that the Sermon on the Mount “is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.” Dobson and Minnery also objected to Obama’s claim that “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values,” calling this a “fruitcake interpretation of the constitution.” Neither mentioned Obama’s critique of those who would remove religion from the public square.

Barack Obama’s campaign and its allies wasted no time in responding to these charges. While Senator Obama accused Dobson of “making stuff up,” the Matthew 25 Network ran an advertisement on Christian radio complaining about the “stones being cast at Senator Obama.” Focus on the Family quickly responded to the advertisement on its webpage, going so far as to produce a video commentary on the topic. Also entering the fray, United Methodist pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell, the African-American evangelical who prayed at George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, sponsored www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com, a site that boasts over 12,000 signatures.

Though the Dobson/Obama debate is itself worthy of analysis, it is even more useful as a Rorschach test for contemporary evangelicalism. Though pundits and social scientists regularly talk about “the evangelical vote,” the contemporary controversy calls attention to something historian Nathan Hatch observed as far back as 1990, namely that “there is no such thing as evangelicalism.”

As a co-founder of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, Hatch did not mean to suggest that there were no religious leaders and organizations flying the evangelical flag. Nor did he wish to minimize the impact of revivalistic Protestantism in American history. What Hatch meant is that evangelicalism is too heterogeneous, theologically diverse, and institutionally pluriform to fit comfortably under a single label. This point was amplified by D.G. Hart in Deconstructing Evangelicalism, a book that traces the invention of the category by scholars, pollsters, and movement leaders. More recently, the journalist Christine Wicker has questioned the claim that conservative Protestantism is a unified, vital movement in The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, noting the over-counting of sheep by the Southern Baptist Convention and the small percentage of conservative Protestants who embrace a rigorous definition of evangelicalism.

The Obama/Dobson debate gets at the same issue by exposing the myth of the evangelical vote. The deep divisions in the evangelical house can be seen in the contrasting reactions to the controversy, suggesting that it may be more accurate to speak of multiple evangelicalisms, rather than a monolithic movement.

On the conservative edge of the evangelical spectrum are organizations like Focus on the Family and the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention. Offering a pro-Dobson response to the conflict, the Convention’s house organ published an editorial entitled, “Dobson is right, Obama distorts the Bible & presents a ‘confused theology’.” Noting the speech was delivered at an event “organized by former Marxist Jim Wallis,” it accused Obama of creating “doubts about the sufficiency of scripture.” Also weighing in against Obama was Vision America Action founder Rick Scarborough.

Though these conservative organizations are not as formidable as their popular reputations, they should not be underestimated. Though the number of faithful Baptists may be grossly inflated by the SBC, the fact that the country’s largest Protestant denomination has already spoken out against Barack Obama will have an impact on the course of the campaign. Likewise, the size and scope of James Dobson’s media empire remains impressive. While the 2006 Baylor Religion Survey found that nearly one out of five Americans had read a book by James Dobson, only 1.2 percent had picked up Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics.

At the same time, there are signs that Dobson’s brand of evangelical conservatism may be losing some of its influence. Michael Lindsay’s study of evangelical elites revealed that many conservative Protestants in the media and political establishment are weary of the rhetoric of James Dobson and Pat Robertson. In a similar trend, the percentage of younger evangelicals identifying as Republican fell from 55 percent in 2005 to 40 percent in 2007. Likewise, the circulation of Focus on the Family’s newsletter dropped from 2.4 million copies in 1994 to 1.1 million today. Compare this with the 600,000 people on the email and subscription lists for Sojourners and the prospects for a progressive evangelicalism begin to look a little brighter.

Since the 2006 Call to Renewal conference, Sojourners and Jim Wallis have been favorably disposed to Obama. Likewise, Senator Obama has been favorably received within the loose movement known as the Emerging Church, an effort to rethink evangelical Christianity in a post-modern age. Responding to Dobson’s critique of Obama, Emerging Church leader and bestselling author Brian McLaren wrote that he was “saddened this week by this beloved Evangelical leader’s religious and political rhetoric.” Barack Obama has also gained a hearing at Relevant magazine, a self-consciously hip publication aimed at younger evangelicals. In an online poll of the magazine’s 75,000 readers during the primary season, 29 percent said that Jesus would vote for Obama (more than any other candidate). Finally, a significant minority of evangelical college students are embracing a new vision of progressive politics. While there are about 2,000 Wheaton College alumni and students listed on the social networking site Facebook, 126 people belong to the group, “Wheaton College, IL for Obama.” Likewise, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s 2006 Urbana gathering focused heavily on such topics as global warming and third world poverty, drawing 23,000 students to the Edward Jones Dome in Saint Louis.

Just as different zones of American society are disproportionately red or blue, various parts of American evangelicalism are more conservative or more liberal. Like its cousin talk radio, evangelical broadcasting remains a bastion of political and religious conservatism. The Matthew 25 Network’s advertisement notwithstanding, you are more likely to encounter evangelical progressives like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis on National Public Radio or Comedy Central than on a Christian radio station. At the same time, large segments of evangelical publishing, higher education, and campus ministry remain open to a new focus on social justice and environmental stewardship. These are precisely the quarters that will prove most receptive to the candidacy of Barack Obama.

As an Obama supporter and a sociologist, I was disappointed to see my candidate draw on an outdated and reductionist approach to religion and culture. Earlier this week, historian Leo Ribuffo noted the parallels between Obama’s comments and the mid-century analysis of the radical right by such figures as Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, and Richard Hofstadter. Though an important part of American intellectual history, their social psychological explanations have not stood the test of time. A more serious concern than sociological fashion is the tendency of such arguments to trivialize complex moral and religious worlds. By reducing the religion of rural Pennsylvanians to mere economic frustration, Obama failed to take seriously the complicated ways people think and talk about their deepest commitments. According to Ribuffo, this was also a flaw of the political sociology of the early 1960s, which dismissed “Church attendance, ethnic solidarity, and other allegedly atavistic behavior . . . as social-psychological symptoms devoid of any sensible rationale.”

It is likely that Obama got his reductionist sociology from Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?. Arguing that the rural Midwest has been seduced by the GOP’s culture war rhetoric, Frank highlights the irony of blue collar Kansans voting against their economic self-interest. Though Frank’s book contains some valuable insights, it has done little to increase our understanding of the religious commitments of Kansas voters. That requires less irony and more empathy. It also requires a commitment to listening that is seldom present in political polemic. Seeing Thomas Frank ridicule the cultural backwardness of his fellow Kansans may elicit cheap laughs, but it will not win elections or help social scientists make sense of the realities of religion on the ground. It is certainly not a good way to attract small town and rural Americans to progressive politics.

When the American Sociological Association featured Frank in a 2005 panel on the “Rightward Turn in U.S. Politics,” the room was packed with sociologists eager to hear his caricature of rural voters. By failing to include an expert on American religion (which would require taking seriously the content of religious beliefs), the ASA missed an opportunity to present a more nuanced picture of conservative politics.

Had Obama been aware of recent developments in the sociology of religion, things might have turned out differently in San Francisco. Oddly enough, some of the best work on American religion has been produced in the very department that granted Michelle Obama her sociology degree in 1985. A member of the Princeton University faculty since 1976, sociologist Robert Wuthnow has been a longstanding critic of the kind of sociological reductionism expressed by Obama in San Francisco. In a 1994 piece on the “Sources of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States” (co-authored with Matthew Lawson), Wuthnow argued, “Fundamentalism has not been a direct psychological response to changing environmental conditions.” Instead of focusing on dark emotions and class resentment, Wuthnow and Lawson looked at the ways that political and economic changes contributed to uncertainty in the moral order of American society, while providing resources for the emergence of new social movements.

Obama could also have benefited from reading Spirit and Flesh, sociologist James Ault’s penetrating ethnography of a fundamentalist church in post-industrial Massachusetts. Rather than portraying conservative religion as a reactionary response to emotional strain, Ault argues that fundamentalist churches provide their members with rich social networks that function as an extended family.

Senator Obama is not alone in his use of outdated social science. According to Harvard University political scientist Theda Skocpol, the Clintons privately disparaged working class voters in the 1990s, criticizing their “proclivity to vote on life-style rather than economic issues.”

Likewise, conservative Republicans have long reduced American culture to a binary struggle between working class populists and latte-sipping Ivy Leaguers. This kind of reductionist analysis goes back at least as far as Kevin Phillips’ 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, a blueprint for the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. In the 1970s, neo-conservatives such as Irving Kristol continued this line of reasoning, contrasting the “adversary culture” of college-educated professionals (whom they dubbed the “new class”), with the bourgeois virtues of working class Americans. Such language came naturally to former Trotskyites.

In light of neo-conservatism’s history of “country and western Marxism” (which substitutes culture for economics), it is ironic to see Kristol’s son William criticize Obama’s class-based analysis. In a column in Monday’s New York Times, the younger Kristol wrote that he searched for his lost copy of The Marx-Engels Reader after learning of Obama’s comments. He could just as easily have consulted his father’s writings. By continuing to use the trope of liberal “elites” versus “the people,” conservatives are being just as reductionist. Such binary logic does not allow for the possibility of cosmopolitan evangelicals or blue-collar atheists (or neo-conservative Washington elites).

How can the Obama campaign counter the charge that he is an elitist? How can progressives better relate to religious voters? One solution is to pay more attention to the nuances of American religion. There are signs that this is beginning to happen.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama participated in the Compassion Forum at Messiah College. As Omri Elisha and Penny Edgell have already noted, the Forum allowed the Democratic candidates to reflect on the relationship between faith and politics (though sometimes in very problematic ways). I appreciate the criticisms Elisha and Edgell made of the Forum’s presuppositions about religion and morality. At the same time, I worry that if progressives wait for a perfect conversation, the discourse surrounding religion and politics will be dominated by one side of the political spectrum. I know of plenty of social justice believers (both past and present) who have used the language of compassion to criticize social structural inequalities. Dorothy Day, for example, was capable of combining Catholic personalism with a radical critique of the social order.

While the Compassion Forum was not perfect, it was certainly innovative. Sponsored by the non-partisan Faith in Public Life, it showed that political progressives are finally doing their homework on American religion. An unprecedented event in American politics, the Forum’s audience included representatives of such diverse groups as the National Association of Evangelicals, the Islamic Society of North America, Sojourners, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

The Forum is part of a broader shift in progressive political tactics. In recent years, organizations such as Faith in Public Life, the Center for American Values in Public Life, and Third Way have commissioned more nuanced investigations of religion in American politics. One such study found that a third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee cast their ballots in the Democratic primaries. Another project used survey data and face-to-face discussions to develop a “framework for bridging the cultural divide that has existed between many progressives and Evangelicals.” Noting that “Evangelical views on cultural issues are far more nuanced than most believe,” the report looked for common ground. This is the kind of political analysis that Barack Obama needs to be reading on the road to the White House. For all I know, he already has. Either way he should ditch the reductionist language of mid-century social science. To speak about common ground should not be difficult for Obama. This is, after all, the candidate who once said: “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”