The following segment from an article by Amy Sullivan (hat tip to Carlos over at Jesus Politics) urges me to say something about the exasperation I feel when people talk about “Separation of Church and State” and then criticize someone like Jim Wallis (or probably Obama as well) on an appeal to it as some sacred principle, elevating to the level of a confession or something. I saw this coming from Mainstream Baptist (here, Clarkson on Obama and Wallis), and it bothered me because I read Bruce’s blog and agree with him 99% of the time. I just wrote a specific retort to Bruce here.

By the way, Amy did a rather good piece and she is not one of those who are all aghast at spekaing of faith in the public square.

In Good Faith – The real meaning of Barack Obama\’s speech on religion and politics. By Amy Sullivan
Bush is known to start each day reading a devotional from My Utmost for His Highest, a collection of essays by 19th-century Scottish minister Oswald Chambers. As Bob Wright explained in the New York Times a few years ago, Chambers had a very simple—some might say comforting—view of divine will. \”The basic idea\” Wright wrote, \”is that once you surrender to God, divine guidance is palpable.\” The only questioning involved is whether one carries out God\’s will, not whether one correctly interprets it.

Those who accuse Bush of being a theocrat have made much of his reported belief that God speaks through him. That\’s not entirely fair, because what Bush refers to is a fairly common hope among believers that God will use each of us to be instruments of justice and mercy and grace. \”May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight,\” from Psalm 19, is a prayer many Christians recite. It\’s just that most of us don\’t express this as a confident assertion that God does in fact speak through us. Instead, the prayer is a humble plea.

Obama chose to emphasize this sentiment when he told the story of his own faith journey. The senator was raised in a primarily secular home: His father was born a Muslim but became an atheist as an adult; his mother was \”spiritual\” but a skeptic of organized religion; his grandparents were nonpracticing Protestants. Obama\’s first prolonged exposure to the church came when he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer. Working with African-American churches, he said, \”I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world.\”

But—and he is firm about this—conversion wasn\’t for him the end point. \”Faith doesn\’t mean that you don\’t have doubts. You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it,\” he said last week.

The Clarson article (Obama Steps In It) and others all over the blogosphere leaves me feeling that many Christian commentators (I’m not sure where Clarkson falls in this; I don’t know much about him) feel more ties to dogmas of political liberalism than they do in the church. It simply cannot be that Christians need to muffle their “faith-based” observations, as if they are automatically suspect because they are supposedly abandoning “rationalism”. It also simply isn’t true that talking of faith is some sort of threat to those who are of “different faiths”. It simply doesn’t follow that the solution to this is to “secularize” the language. NOw I myself have criticized James KA Smith for being so harsh on Wallis and “Progressives” , “underwriting” what are, at root, values of enlightenment and liberal democracy projects. For one, this comes as sort of a blindside; not tooo many people, iincluding myself prior to last year, had ever made such connections between a Christian attempt to witness to the state by appealing to “goods held in common” such as the language of democracy, and a “rival” theology to the church. I have become persuaded by much of that analysis, but prefer to maintain my appreciation for those who have been offering their leadership in proclaiming a Christianity that “speaks the truth to power” and “demonstates alternatives” to the socioeconomics of our American brand of capitalism. Now, I see that it needs to be done to defend the likes of Wallis and “Progressive Christians” from the wing of the church that reads too much, me thinks, into the dogma of the “Separation of Church and State”. I for one, applaud Obama, and he’s the best sort of hope for our political system against the more virulent forms of theocracy that all the liberals fear. The likes of Obama and Jim Wallis we should rather strongly prefer, for the sake of even of our own ability to “be heard” in the public square without being turned away because we use the “f” word (faith), oe worse, utter the name of Jesus.