Barack Obama: Putting faith out front

At a speech last month at the annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference in Virginia, he offered his most detailed list to date of programs he said should spring from "our faith, the Word, and His will." They range from a new service corps for disadvantaged youths and a program to have nurses teach low-income mothers good parenting to more jobs programs for ex-convicts and more venture capital for minority-owned businesses.

Elsewhere, he has preached a version of his church's critique of black "middleclassness." He told a crowd in Selma, Ala., in March that his generation of blacks should strive for more than just "some of that Oprah money."

"Materialism alone will not fulfill the possibilities of your existence," he said. "You have to fill it with the golden rule. You've got to fill it with thinking about others."

Last year, he and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, sponsored a successful bill to let people in bankruptcy continue to donate money to their places of worship.

Obama's advisers say his open faith and personal narrative are political assets as churchgoers grow increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Bush. "The ultimate swing voters right now are moderate Catholic voters and moderate evangelical voters," says Shaun Casey, professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington and an Obama campaign adviser. "There are more opportunities for Democrats with them than there have been in about 20 years."

In addition to Mr. DuBois, the campaign has faith-outreach workers on staff in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. It holds conference calls every week with religious leaders in the early primary states. And it has staged a half dozen "faith forums" in New Hampshire, where voters, local clergy, and campaign staff trade views on the proper role of faith in public life.

A Time magazine poll released Thursday found that more voters see Obama as a strongly religious person than they do every major presidential hopeful but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts whose Mormonism has drawn extensive news coverage.

But whether that public perception translates into votes, even among the 1.2 million members of Obama's own denomination, has yet to be seen.

At the annual gathering for Iowa clergy of the United Church of Christ, which Obama addressed last month, the finance chair of a church outside Des Moines said he had thought Obama was Muslim.

Another church leader, pastor Al Hohl of the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Sioux City, Iowa, said he hadn't heard such candid talk of faith from a liberal since his days as a seminary student in the 1960s. He found it refreshing, but plans to vote for Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor and Democratic presidential candidate, whom he views as more politically experienced.

But others there said Obama gave voice to deeply held yet seldom expressed convictions about a progressive role for organized religion. "It's time we stand up to the conservatives," said Barbara Brandt, a parish administrator at a UCC church in Reinbeck, Iowa. "We're as Christian as they are."

Pastor disinvited

Obama's mingling of faith and politics has drawn fire from some on both the left and the right.

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