Berliners on Sunday voted against introducing compulsory religion lessons in schools. Social Democrat Mayor Klaus Wowereit has welcomed the result as a victory for “togetherness” and common values for Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or aetheist children.

For details on the result, look at the Reuters story.

However, as Pro Reli leader Christoph Lehmann said, the campaign to boost the status of faith-based lessons in the German capital — a city with a long secular tradition — has put the subject firmly on the agenda and made it a talking point.

Celebrities and politicians, even conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel,have joined the call for religion lessons. Perhaps she was trying to make amends with members of her predominantly Catholic Christian Democrats (CDU) who were angry with her for criticising the Pope in the row over a Holocaust-denying bishop.

Even the pope has weighed in.

The argument in Berlin, which is home to Germany’s biggest Muslim community, centred on whether children who have a deep knowledge of their own faith are more tolerant of people who have a different religion than those who receive a broader education in ethics which touches on several religions. Does an in-depth grounding in one religion equip children with a stronger moral compass?

For more detail on the arguments, you can see last week’s post and story.

However, the campaign has had another, perhaps unexpected, result. Despite suggestions by the Pro Ethik camp that faith-based religion lessons would promote Christianity, the Pro Reli campaign ended up uniting Berlin’s main faiths — several Muslim and Jewish groups backed the Pro Reli cause.

Perhaps in the end, that is its biggest achievement.

Our Jerusalem bureau has sent a very interesting report about criticism within the Israeli army of the Gaza offensive in January. What caught my eye was that it brings up the issue of a religious war, a term usually used in relation to Muslims.

(Photo: Israeli air strike near Gaza-Egypt border in southern Gaza Strip, 26 Feb 2009/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

The story starts off as follows:

Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive that they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.

“Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper on the second day of revelations about the Gaza offensive that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009″)…

The officer felt there was a “huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out”.

The corps distributed pamphlets about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, he said.  But the rabbinate’s message imparted to many soldiers the sense that “this operation was a religious war”.

Read the whole article here.

It’s hard to know when to use terms like “religious war” for violence such as what we’ve seen in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Afghanistan. The opposing sides in these conflicts have different religious labels, so there is — at least superficially — a religious angle there. But there is also an underlying political struggle which often plays a far bigger role than those labels. Northern Ireland, for example, is not about religion but has often been presented mostly as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants. By contrast, the unrest in Sri Lanka pits secessionist Tamils (Hindus) against majority Sinhalese (Buddhists), but nobody calls that a religious war. Some seem to evolve — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on more religious overtones over time while the Taliban are now seen more as insurgents than the Koran students their name signals.

What do you think? When is a conflict a religious war and when is it more a political struggle going on behind those labels? Or is it impossible to disentangle the two?

Here is our video report on the story and the script (including translations).

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Libyan theologian Aref Ali Nayed is a senior advisor to the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a leading signatory of A Common Word.

By Aref Ali Nayed

Being held in the early days of the Obama presidency, this year’s U.S.-Muslim World Forum in Doha last weekend was particularly luminescent with rays of hope. One was the very fact that its host, the influential Brookings Institution think-tank, invited faith leaders to discuss how to improve the dreadful state of relations between Washington and the Muslim world. The basis for discussion was A Common Word, an appeal by 138 Muslim scholars to Christian leaders to join in a dialogue based on the shared commandments to love God and love one’s neighbor.

That a theological and spiritual initiative is of keen interest to policy planners is indeed a fresh ray of light.  Basking in that hopeful light, moreover, I had the rare privilege for a Muslim theologian of listening to the U.S. CentCom Commander General David Petraeus expound there on a “network of networks” that constituted a “security architecture” for our Middle East region.

(Photo: General David Petraeus addresses the U.S.-Muslim World Forum, 14 Feb 2009/Osama Faisal)

General Petraeus argued that security can only be achieved through a multi-layered and multi-faceted network of networks that involved training, tooling and equipping, information sharing, and infrastructure building.

I very much liked the talk of a network of networks and indeed agreed with the need for training, tooling, information sharing and infrastructure building. Alas, I had to keep reminding myself, while looking at the elegantly uniformed speaker, that it is a military network of networks that he was advocating and that all those nice-sounding activities pertained to matters military. It turned out that I very much liked the structure of what General Petraeus was proposing, but definitely not its content!

The training we truly need is training in compassionate dialogue between all of us and in compassionate living amongst each other. The tools and equipment we truly need are those of compassionate communication and understanding. The information sharing we truly need is the honest sharing of, and witnessing to, our loftiest ideals and values and the cooperative shedding of dark stereotypes and caricatures of others. The infrastructures we truly need to build are infrastructures of public and shared spaces in which we respectfully appreciate and cherish each other just as we stand firmly rooted in our respective traditions.

The Obama presidency does NOT need more of the same “security architecture” inherited from the destructive, divisive and corrosive years of the Bush presidencies. Rather, it urgently needs a fresh “compassion architecture” that is constructive, mending and healing. Such a compassion architecture can only be communal and cooperative. All religious, spiritual and philosophical communities, Muslims included, must contribute to it.

(Photo: Aref Ali Nayed at U.S.-Muslim World Forum, 15 Feb 2009/Sohail Nakhooda)

Compassion architecture is built on the theological fact that true security can only come from God’s own compassion towards humanity and the compassion of humans towards humans. Compassion is the condition of possibility of true security.

A Common Word, which was launched in October 2007, is an important  contribution to an alternative compassion architecture. Its signatories, whose number has since grown to 301, include Muslim scholars and thinkers of all theological schools, both genders, all ages and occupations.

The response from Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians has been very  positive and several constructive conferences have already been held with them to explore our common ground. Some Jewish scholars have also made positive and encouraging comments and they will be addressed in a similar document.

For example, Muslim scholars met evangelical Christian leaders last summer at a conference at Yale University, for many the first time either had sat down to discuss faith with the other.  It was a transformative event.  The dark and twisted images Muslims and evangelicals often had of each other came tumbling down. A door for compassionate cooperation opened.

Last November, a Common Word delegation of two dozen Muslim scholars, led by Grand Mufti of Bosnia Mustafa Ceric, met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican and held three days of talks with leading Catholic scholars there.  The encounter was soothing and healing after the wounds of the pope’s speech in Regensburg in 2006.

(Photo: Pope Benedict and Grand Mufti Ceric at Vatican, 6 Nov 2008/Osservatore Romano)

Last month, one of Islam’s top Muslim television preachers, Amr Khaled, toured several Muslim countries including Sudan to rally tens of thousands of young people around the theme of A Common Word. The response proved overwhelmingly positive.

Initiatives such as A Common Word are giving rise to a “network of networks of compassion” with multiple nodes and growing complexity and interconnectivity. Much like the internet, this network of networks does not depend on any one node. It is robust and resilient precisely because it is so widespread and interconnected.  Compassion achitecture will rise from a wide variety of initiatives such as A Common Word coming together.

In a ‘stuck’ or ‘jammed’ world situation, A Common World hits the reset button with fresh and purified presuppositions. Now, we watch the lights come on in a fresh way, a way that may very well get our world going again. What better presuppositions to start with than Love of God and Love of Neighbor?

Reorienting and purifying intentions is the most important change to make if the Obama “change platform” is to work. Change requires a shift from self-righteous arrogance to attitudes of humility, concern for others, brokenness-before-God, compassion and understanding.

What humanity needs most today is a prophetic teaching of compassion and love. Inherent in A Common Word is a lofty, scriptures-based exhortation from which many lessons, sermons and much guidance can flow.

(Photo: Amr Khaled preaching in Sanaa, 1 July 2007/Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi)

Today we are all frightened, in one way or another, physically, politically, socially, and economically. For too many years, fear ran our lives both as actors and acted-upon. During those terrible Bush years, the generals and security agencies thrived on offering their “Security Architectures”. It is time for true change: change from fear to hope, from hate to love, from madness to sanity and from cruelty to compassion. The new day is indeed luminescent with rays of hope!

God knows best!

With the financial crisis erupting around the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Protestant theologian John Calvin, many people in the Netherlands — where his thinking played an important role in forming the local culture — are looking back at his influence and what he might say of the current crisis and the people involved.

(Photo: Dutch Old Masters used skulls and stubby candles to portray the Calvinist idea of the vanity of greed/Robin van Lonkhuijsen/United Photos)

Several of the issues are described in my feature “Moral rebound finds Dutch exploring Calvin.” One of the most interesting elements was an online survey by the Protestant newspaper Trouw called “C-Factor.”

“Test how Calvinist you are, in your convictions, at work and in your love life,” it said in its challenge to readers. It asks 25 questions (sorry, only in Dutch) such as:

“I should really work harder.”

“Making exceptions to rules weakens the rules.”

” I like to dine in luxury.”

“Other people are more important than me.”

“I borrow money for nice things even when I don’t really need them.”

Tests like this are amusing, but you have to wonder about the results. A Dutch reporter in our Amsterdam bureau, who grew up in the Dutch “Bible Belt” and went to a high school in Kampen named after Calvin, got an unexpected 47 percent. A Catholic colleague with a solid Jesuit education got 58 percent. I’m a Brit with no links to Calvinism in my background, and I ended up scoring 75 percent.

Have you ever taken these “test your religion” tests? Were you surprised?

An analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that blacks are considerably more religious than the overall U.S. population. You can see the whole report here.

“While the U.S. is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life,” the report says.

Its highlights include:

- Nearly eight in 10 blacks (79 percent) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56 percent among all U.S. adults.

- Blacks attend religious services and pray more frequently than the general population. While 39 percent of all Americans report attending religious services at least once a week, 53 percent of blacks report the same.

- Similarly, while 58 percent of all Americans report praying at least once a day, 76 percent of blacks report praying daily.

- The vast majority of blacks are Protestant (78 percent), compared with 51 percent of the U.S. adult population as a whole.

The findings, drawn mostly from data within  Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey conducted in 2007, have political as well as cultural implications.

President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party made a strong bid in last November’s presidential election to woo voters of faith — a strategy that dovetailed neatly with Obama’s strong appeal to the party’s black base.

The survey also highlights the cultural and social conservatism of U.S. blacks on issues such as gay rights.

According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in the summer of 2008, nearly two-thirds of blacks said they opposed gay marriage compared to 51 percent among whites.

Some leading groups in the religious right such as the Family Research Council have been tapping this vein by forming alliances with leading black Christian conservatives.

Democrat and Republican strategists will no doubt read this report carefully.

(Photo: Barack Obama at a New Orleans church, Aug. 26, 2007. REUTERS/Lee Celano, USA)

The Russian Orthodox Church elected Metropolitan Kirill, 62, as its new leader on Tuesday, succeeding Alexiy II who died last month. The new leader of the 165 million-strong Church, the largest in the Orthodox world,  is seen as a moderniser who may thaw long icy ties with the Roman Catholic Church.

There was speculation before the vote that nationalists, anti-westerners and anti-Catholic forces among the clergy and monks might rally to block Kirill’s election. He seemed to take the possibility seriously enough to strike a conservative tone in recent days. In his address before the vote, Kirill spoke of “the assault of aggressive Western secularism against Christianity” and of “attempts by some Protestant groups to revise the teachings of Christianity and evangelical morality”. He also hit out at Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries, saying they sought converts in post-Soviet Russia — a key point of discord with the Vatican.

(Photo: Metropolitan Kirill before the vote, 27 Jan 2009/Alexander Natruskin)

But the vote showed his support was strong. Kirill received 508 votes from a total of 677 valid ballots cast. His rival, conservative nationalist Metropolitan Kliment, 59, polled just 169 votes and a third candidate, Metropolitan Filaret of Belarus, withdrew in favour of Kirill.

Kirill, whose official title is Metropolitan (senior archbishop) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, is one of the few  senior Russian clerics to have met Pope Benedict. He favours closer ties with the Vatican and observers say he would chart a more independent course for the Russian church.

Hopes of a thaw have been fuelled by Kirill’s meetings with Pope Benedict at the Vatican in 2006 and 2007 and his optimistic comments about better relations with Rome. He even spoke about a thaw in an interview with the pope’s own paper, L’Osservatore Romano.

(Photo: Pope Benedict and Metropolitan Kirill at the Vatican, 7 Dec 2007/L’Osservatore Romano)

But Kirill has also echoed Alexei’s criticisms of Catholics on occasions. On Monday, as delegates gathered for the election, Kirill said in a newspaper interview that there was some way to go before a meeting between the heads of the two churches would be possible. “A meeting between the patriarch and the pope will become possible only when there are conclusive signs of real and positive progress on issues which for a long time have been problematic for our relations,” he said.

Here’s our video of the voting session in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, with a long clip of Kirill addressing the Local Council (in Russian):

Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois,  chairman of the French Bishops Conference, held a press briefing on Saturday evening on the lifting of excommunications of four bishops of the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). France is home to the largest of the provinces of the dissident group, with around 100,000 faithful  of a worldwide total of 600,000. Sitting in a medieval meeting room in Notre Dame cathedral, he defended Pope Benedict’s decision to take the four bishops back into the Roman Catholic Church and indicated the SSPX would have to bend to Church discipline.

(Photo: Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, 8 Sept 2008/Benoit Tessier)

He called the decision “a measure of clemency and mercy” that would allow the Church to repair a damaging split. He declined to question the bishops’ motives, saying that “when people express their desire to respect the teachings of the church and the primacy of the pope, my ministry of mercy does not allow me suspect them a priori and to suspect them to be the worst people on earth … what they have in their hearts, only God can judge. Not me.”

The handful of journalists present repeatedly asked about one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, whose denial of the Holocaust this week outraged Jewish leaders. “The Jewish community was not shocked by this decision, it was shocked by the comments of Bishop Williamson,” he said. “He may have some twisted thoughts, but it’s not because the excommunication is lifted that these twisted thoughts have been approved.”

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson/SSPX)

Although the Vatican said that SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay had pledged to respect the pope and Church teachings, Fellay posted a letter on an SSPX site saying the bishops still opposed some reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. Asked about this apparent discrepancy, Vingt-Trois said he had not read Fellay’s letter. But he indicated that the SSPX could not have it both ways:

“One cannot both say that one recognises the primacy of the pope and wants to respect him and also set oneself up as the judge of the authenticity of the Catholic tradition. In the Christian tradition, in the Christian experience, the interpretation of the tradition is not a private exercise. It is a church exercise and it is done by the magisterium, notably by the pope as the first of the apostolic college, but also by the other bishops. So an individual group is not going to say what the authentic teaching of the church is … well, until now…”

Vingt-Trois stressed that the lifting of the bans on the four bishops was a first step meant to allow both sides to sit down and thrash out their differences: “One cannot say today how (the SSPX) will respond to this proposal and how they will engage in this work.” This is not an international negotiation under United Nations auspices, he added. “The pope is not the symmetric interlocutor of Bishop Fellay,” he said. “Bishop Fellay’s letter doesn’t say that either. He recognises the primacy of the pope. If there is a primacy of the pope, there is a dissymmetry.”

(Photo: the four SSPX bishops Alfonso de Galarreta, Richard Williamson, Bernard Fellay and Bernard Tissier de Mallerais in May 2008/SSPX)

The cardinal said today’s step did not change the status of SSPX priests, who remain outside the Catholic Church until their status is clarified. The lifting on the excommunications concerned only the four bishops and had no further immediate consequences.

He defended the pope’s decision as a bid to end the 20-year split before it got too wide. “When one sees what happened at the Reformation and the break between Catholics and Protestants, one sees the missed opportunities, the periods where there were people who really worked on both sides to avoid the division and maintain unity,” he said. “The failure of those opportunities that meant the two traditions gradually drifted apart. The further apart one drifts, the harder it is to get back together again.”

Also today, the head of the German bishops’ conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, supported the decision as proof of “the readiness of Pope Benedict to take another step towards the schismatic movement of the late archbishop in order to foster the unity of the Church.

“Pope Benedict is offering his hand to the Society of Saint Pius X. With him, I hope and pray that they take it. The Pope is showing the possibility of a return into full communion with the Catholic Church and, at the same time, leaves no doubt that the decisions of the Second Vatican Council are the indispensible basis for the life of the Church.”

In another reaction (audio here in French), Rev. Michel Kubler, religion editor of the French Catholic daily La Croix, said the ball was now in the SSPX’s court: “As a colleague at La Croix said, they’ve been given a visa to return but now they have to buy their tickets.” He expressed concern about Fellay’s letter saying they did not accept some Vatican II reforms.

(Photo: SSPX procession on St Peter’s Square, 2000/SSPX)

“What do they challenge? Only secondary things, or essential things like liturgical reform, which we think about a lot, or religious liberty, ecumenical dialogue, interreligious opening or the relationship of the Church to the world?” Kubler asked.

“The schism hasn’t been overcome. We have to overcome differences in doctrine. To take an analogy, 40 years ago, the Catholic and the Orthodox churches lifted the reciprocal excommunications imposed in 1054 in the famous schism between Rome and Byzantium that lasts to this day.” There have been fruitful discussions in the past 40 years, he said, but the schism remains. “It will probably be the same with the traditionalists, but I hope it won’t take 1,000 years for them to decide to return.”

The left-wing Catholic magazine Golias wrote in an angry editorial: “The people of God are increasingly tested in its trust in a hierarchy that turns its back on their ideals. It is probable that the free hand given to the enemies of the (Second Vatican) Council ends by provoking holy fury. By going very far, perhaps too far, Joseph Ratzinger — Pope Benedict — has broken the sound barrier. His decision to bring the disciples of Archbishop Lefebvre back into the fold will necessarily lead to more resistance.”

“Actually, for Pope Benedict — Joseph Ratzinger — the Council simply marked a regrettable parenthesis that some naive people thought was enchanted. The page has turned.”

The French SSPX website has posted another video marking the lifting of the excommunications. It’s mostly about Archbishop Lefebvre.

Of all the denunciations of greed coming from the pulpits in this financial crisis, few have had as much sting as the attack that Bishop Wolfgang Huber of Berlin delivered just before Christmas. Huber, who as council chairman of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) is the country’s top Protestant prelate, singled out the head of the biggest German bank when he lambasted top financiers for their rush for profits.

(Photo: Bishop Wolfgang Huber, 5 Nov 2006/Alex Grimm)

Referring to Josef Ackermann, he told the Berliner Zeitung that he hoped “a Deutsche Bank chief executive should never again set a profit goal of 25 per cent.” Such goals fuelled excessive profit expectations and amounted to a form of idolatry, he said. “In these circumstances, money has become a god.”

The bank angrily rejected his criticism as “inappropriate.”

Now comes the news that Huber has apologised to Ackermann. “Since many have suspected I was personally attacking Mr Ackermann, I have apologised to him,” he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. “The issue now is not to criticise a single person, it must be to discuss at length what led to this financial crisis. And what we must avoid, so as not to fall into equally destructive mechanisms again.”

Many religious leaders’ comments about the crisis seemed a bit tame considering all the damage it’s done and the way few if any business leaders have accepted any blame. At least Huber was clear. Was his comment really over the top? Are critics not allowed to single out prominent business leaders who they think contributed to this mess?

(Photo: Josef Ackermann, 17 Nov 2008/Kai Pfaffenbach)

Germany is launching an appeal to save thousands of valuable letters and manuscripts which had belonged to Protestant theologian and Nazi resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer by digitalising them.

(Photo: 1995 German stamp honouring Bonhoeffer)

The Berlin state library says it needs 40,000 euros to save the documents which it counts as one of its most prized collections. It wants to put about 6,200 pages of his work on the Internet to make them more widely available.

The papers include the farewell letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents before his execution in a concentration camp in 1945, just days before the end of World War Two, for opposing Hitler. He was 39.

Last summer, the library put the originals in non-corroding folders as the paper was in danger of falling apart and had been damaged by rusting paper clips. The collection also includes draft papers, sermons he held in Barcelona and New York as well as fragments from his book Ethics.

Bonhoeffer is viewed by many as one of the most important Protestant theologians of the last century. He was a leading member of the Confessing Church which opposed the Nazis.

He was particularly against the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies, arguing Christians had a duty to resist any unlawful action undertaken by the state. He wrestled with the question of how far a Christian can go in fighting evil — and whether a Christian, or a pacifist, can justify murder.

He was arrested and imprisoned in 1943 on suspicion of conspiracy.

How important is it to save Bonhoeffer’s bequest and how much relevance does his work have today?

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few months on this and other blogs about Barack Obama and religion. Looking back at it now that the campaign is over and he is starting to shape his administration, it’s interesting to see how many of those discussions shed little light on what he would actually do. There were comments about him being a hidden Muslim, for example, or not a real Christian. That speculation seemed based on thin evidence and the assumption he was running for preacher and cleric-in-chief rather than president and commander-in-chief. As a journalist covering religion in public life, after learning whether a candidate professes a certain faith, I want to know how that faith will really influence his or her decisions in office. This is not necessarily the same as listing the soundbite positions used on the campaign trail.

(Photo: Barack Obama at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, 15 June 2008/John Gress)

Seen from this point of view, probably the most interesting fact about Barack Obama’s religious views is one that rarely gets mentioned. It’s that he’s an admirer of the late American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). The President-elect has clearly named “America’s leading public theologian” as a major influence on his thinking. It comes out less in specific positions than in the way he looks at problems and discusses policies in terms with a ”Niebuhrian” ring about them.

In April 2007, Obama told David Brooks of the New York Times that Niebuhr was one of his favourite thinkers.  So I asked, What do you take away from him? Brooks asked:

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

Brooks noted that this was “a pretty good off-the-cuff summary” of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. Although written in 1952 during the Cold War (and recently republished), that short book reads today like a warning against what historian Andrew J. Bacevich calls “the evangelical moment in U.S. foreign policy” marked by “an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.”

Since domestic issues are so different now, I asked Niebuhr’s biographer Richard Wightman Fox for his view of the theologian’s influence here. He first mentioned Niebuhr’s belief — which he shared with another Obama favourite, Abraham Lincoln — that God acts in history but human beings cannot know his plans. This puts limits on utopian aspirations and quick-fix approaches. “This is very much part of Obama’s sensibility,” Fox said.

(Photo: cover of The Irony of American History)

But both also have a larger vision behind their realism, he added, taking Obama’s economic plans as an example: “It’s about a sort of green New Deal. This is not just about economic stimulus or putting people back in their homes. It’s about a kind of social justice where the green revolution would actually make life better for the poor, the sick and the old who suffer disproportionately from environmental devastation.   He may not talk about that side of it as much as he talks about economic stimulus, but if we were to ask him what the Christian side or Niebuhrian side of his politics was, he would say something like this. There’s a vision behind the pragmatism.”

The Niebuhr perspective gives Fox a different view of another big blogosphere issue, Obama’s relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church. “He didn’t go there because it was racially inflected ministry. He went there because it was a social justice inflected ministry. It was the United Church of Christ, and therefore I don’t think he ever subscribed to the particularly racial view Wright had,” Fox said. “It’s much more a Niebuhrian vision, where social justice comes first, and that’s for everybody, not just blacks but other groups that are excluded.”

One big unanswered question is what a Niebuhrian outlook means for Obama when it comes to an issue like abortion. “I don’t recall Niebuhr ever weighing in on that. It never came up,” Fox said, noting that Niebuhr focused mostly on foreign policy in years before his death in 1971.  But Obama has spoken about the “moral dimension of abortion” and ways to reduce the level of abortions — remarks that are not usually heard from Democrats.

(Photo: University of Southern California history professor Richard Wightman Fox)

Niebuhr could be so nuanced in his positions that both conservatives and liberals cite him as an influence. During his campaign, Obama pleased liberals by pledging to pass the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) as soon as he became president, which would effectively scrap federal and state limits on abortion. This has become a major issue for anti-abortion activists, including the Roman Catholic Church, who are actively campaigning against it. Since being elected, though, several of Obama’s key appointments have pleased conservatives and disappointed liberals. Some observers think Obama has no real intention of pushing FOCA through when he has so many pressing economic issues before him.  Is he planning to finesse his position here to something more balanced, complex and, well … Niebuhrian?