Labels and Lists

This morning in church one of our patriarchs prayed that President Obama would receive Jesus and become a Christian.  I think the president would have been surprised to hear this prayer.  I don't think the Lord was surprised, based on the fact that He is never surprised at what people do.  I also believe that the Lord heard in the prayer a desire to bless the president and intercede for our country.

The president describes himself as a baptized Christian.  In a book which he wrote long before he became politically active, he describes his turn toward Christianity, which represented a dramatic shift from how he was raised.  He describes a spiritual experience in about four pages of the book Dreams from my Father.
No water baptism record can be found and the church where Obama first became a member apparently has membership rituals that do not necessarily include water baptism.  Membership classes and walking to the front during a public meeting afterward are part of the ritual.

One of my overwhelming impressions from reading his life story as he wrote it is how irreligious his upbringing had been.  There were a few religious schools in his background, however.  For a time he attended a Catholic school in Hawaii.  Later he attended a Muslim school when his mother married an Indonesian man and moved there with her young son.  Most of the time he attended public schools.

Obama's American grandfather was a restless man who moved his family from Kansas to one or more other mainland states until finally moving them all to Hawaii when their daughter, Obama's mother, was still at home.  It was there, in college, that she met and married Barack's father, who abandoned the family before long to attend school in the northeastern part of the U.S. mainland.  Later he returned to his homeland, Kenya, and, when Barack was ten years old, he came to visit his ex-wife and son.  It was the only time Barack remembers seeing his father.  When he visited Kenya much later, his father had already died.

Obama's mother deliberately turned away from Christianity to secularism as a youth.  His birth father was a secular Muslim.  When Barack's mother remarried in Hawaii, the family moved to the new husband's homeland, Indonesia--a largely Muslim country.  Young Barack loved his first few years there, but eventually became dissatisfied, so he was sent back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, who were nonreligious.  His mother followed some time later, after her second marriage failed.  It was after college, while working as a community organizer in Chicago, that he began to work with local churches on social projects and apparently reconsidered his "default" rejection of Christianity.  He began to attend church and, it was there that he experienced a spiritual  awakening.

In search of further information about Obama's faith, I just now read a seemingly well-researched piece that declared that Obama could not be a Christian because he had not received water baptism, either as an infant or as an adult.  Hmmmm.  I don't think that was exactly the logic the aforementioned patriarch from our church was employing this morning.

I think it's far more likely that he had heard pre-packaged, pre-election, second-hand political rhetoric painting the president with broad "enemy-of-Christianity" strokes.  His positions on gay marriage and abortion lend some credence to that characterization, because they do not reflect truth as found in Scripture--the Christian guidebook.

How do you see it?  Are you inclined to believe someone who self-identifies as a Christian?  Do you distinguish between a Christian-by-association or a born-again Christian?  How is it with Muslims?  Do you assume that anyone who associates with Muslims is therefore himself a Muslim, or do you distinguish between association or personal commitment?  How about Communism or Marxism?  The piece I just read included that in the list of religious beliefs to be examined and labeled.

I'd rather not make pronouncements about Obama's standing with God.  In the personal commitment department I see more evidence for Christianity than Muslim faith or Communism.  I do desire for him a personal relationship with Christ--the kind that finds a friend in Jesus, but also a Savior and Lord.  I desire to see love for others, commitment to honesty, integrity, kindness, generosity, and humility before the King of Kings.  I also desire to see him affirm the sanctity of all human life and the masterful, holy design of marriage as created in the Garden of Eden.  In my private prayers I will be likely to pray along such lines.

After the election last week, I made a handwritten list with three headings:

Things I'm Sad About (Things I think would have been better if the other presidential candidate had won.)
Things I'm Glad About (Things I think will be better with this candidate.)
Things I Feel Neutral About (This list contained items that I thought would likely have been similar regardless of who had won the presidential election.)

I'm not a glutton for punishment, and feel no desire to wear political labels of any kind, so I'll let you guess what might have been on those lists--or which list was the longest.  Better yet, I encourage you to make your own lists.