Illinois Senator Barack Obama is attracting attention because of his promises to practice a new, less partisan, type of politics, based on common values that unite, not divide. He describes that program in his new campaign book, The Audacity of  Hope. My hope is that his new politics will approach public religion in a way that unites, not divides, us because it is grounded in common constitutional values and not the senator’s particular Christian faith.
    The book suggests a better approach to religion than the one currently in vogue, in which politicians speak openly of their faith—usually Christian—and then imply that their policies will be based upon that belief. This style of public faith is popular because it seems to guarantee that morals and religion will not be chased from public life. Senator Obama also longs to keep morality and religion present in politics, but defends the  classically liberal manner of doing so. In his words:
The senator acknowledges that some religious groups will always oppose translation, viewing it as a capitulation to secularism. Nonetheless, he insists that “in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice” but to use reason, not faith, because politics, the realm of compromise, must be based on common values.
    The liberal ideal described by Senator Obama is morally demanding and difficult to practice, requiring its own set of virtues. It asks people to put aside their personal commitment to their own religion and their own self-interest and instead to think as citizens who are concerned for the community as a whole. It requires them to recognize that it is wrong to ask their neighbors of a different religious tradition to be governed by a faith that is not their own. It urges them to remember that the shared agreement not to be governed by any one religion is the best guarantee of freedom for all religions.
    The liberal standard thus sets a high moral ideal, so demanding that it is not clear that even Senator Obama has yet met it. After the senator expressed his disapproval of gay marriage, for example, a *** supporter called to explain her disappointment that he had referred to his religious beliefs in order to explain his opposition to gay marriage but not civil unions. The woman’s comment oddly led Obama to reflect more deeply, not on common values, but about his Christian faith. He speculated that his interpretation of the Bible could be wrong, “that Jesus’ call to love one another might demand a different conclusion,” that good Christians were allowed to be uncertain about their tradition’s teaching on gay marriage, but that he remained opposed to it (222-24).
    Thus, when pressed on a hard question, the senator took the easy way out--he did not immediately “translate his concern into universal, rather than religion-specific, values,” nor did he invoke some “principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” This omission was unfortunate, because such values and principles are readily available in our constitutional democracy: we call them equal protection and privacy and religious freedom.
    I have the audacity to hope that soon Barack Obama will practice what he preaches, resist the temptations of the old politics of religion, and lead us into a new politics based on the moral value inscribed in the First Amendment, namely that religious freedom is best protected when no one tries to impose his or her religious principles on persons of different faith or no faith at all.  As the Senator wrote, “I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day.”