I first opposed the candidacy of Barack Obama during his 2004 Senate race when my good friend former assistant secretary of state Alan Keyes ran against him. Despite being a resident of Maryland, Alan had answered a distress signal from Illinois Republican Party officials, who couldn’t drum up anyone to run against the young, charismatic state lawmaker. A senatorial campaign in which both candidates from the major parties were African-American made it unique, but on policy, Obama and Keyes were diametric opposites: Alan supported the war in Iraq and believed Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11; Obama opposed it and argued there was no connection. Alan said gay marriage was invalid morally and biologically—gay couples could not procreate; Obama believed homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Alan believed parents, not schools, should be responsible for educating children on the facts of life; Obama argued that schools should be involved. For Alan, the Illinois election was about transcendent moral principles: marriage and the sanctity of life. Obama seemed to me to resort to a predictable liberal platform of seeking the values we have in common and avoiding moral crusades.
Alan’s bold and unapologetic challenge to the pro-death, leftist-liberal, “statist” establishment—now embodied in a fellow man of color, but with a foreign last name—made him a hero in my world then but a sideshow for mainstream voters. In the end, Alan was trounced by the young star. For me, Obama as a Senate candidate and later as a presidential hopeful was two-dimensional. He was pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and against nearly everything that was important to me.
Senator Obama issued a statement acknowledging the differences of opinion about abortion but saying he hoped for unity “to honor the entirety of Christ’s teachings by working to eradicate the scourge of AIDS, poverty and other challenges we all can agree must be met . . . It is that spirit which has allowed me to work together—and pray together—with some of my conservative colleagues in the Senate to make progress on a range of key issues facing America.” At that time it was jarring for me to hear Barack Obama preach about the “entirety of Christ’s teachings.” Even though he used our language so fluently, I was sure it was insincere. I even dispatched a staff member to Chicago to visit the Obama family church, Trinity United Church of Christ, to check out his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose leftist liberation theology was apparent in his preaching. I got all the data I needed to label Obama a heretic.
In 2008, without having served one entire term in the Senate, Obama announced he would challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. I went on Nightline and stated my reasons for opposing him. Put simply, I said, he represented political positions inimical to God’s moral will. I helped the National Pro-Life Religious Council compose a thick briefing book for our allies and friends to use as talking points against the “Obamanation.” I realized we were up against a strong contender, however, when I tested the material on my own daughter. Sheepishly, Anna told me she and her friends all planned to vote for him.
Admittedly, our Republican candidate, John McCain, did not exactly inspire trust and enthusiasm within my community. I met with his advisors several times and came away wholly unimpressed, especially by their attitude on religion, which ranged from indifference to more indifference. Mitt Romney—the virtuous and deeply religious Massachusetts former governor—was my candidate. It had taken me a bit of time to make peace with his Mormon faith—which, in evangelical circles, had always been considered false and cultic—but I came to see how much we agreed on core moral tenets. I also liked him personally.
I traveled the country with Romney’s campaign, sometimes visiting several small towns in a single day. I experienced a mind-boggling, full-immersion tutorial in presidential politics: the Herculean demands, the constant reactivity and vigilance, the relentless monotony of one small gathering over cake and coffee after another—each one a make-or-break donor and voter opportunity. It was exhausting enough to participate for just a few weeks; it was unimaginable for months and months. But Romney just couldn’t best his rivals, and on February 7, 2008, I walked with the governor on his way to the podium at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, where he ended his bid.
I quickly divided my remaining time between supporting McCain and blocking Obama from becoming the next president. Backing McCain was excruciating. His “straight talk” personality was, at best, curmudgeonly and often rude and peremptory. He clearly had no interest in the concerns of evangelicals, although his supporters, major donors, and advisors reached out and tried to persuade me he would be a great president—and not only because his opponent was so clearly unqualified. The title of his memoir, Faith of My Fathers, from his time as a POW in Vietnam, gave McCain’s campaign the opportunity to cast him as religious man, but I thought it phony and cynical. He had also cleverly moved his church attendance from the liberal Episcopal Church of his upbringing to a Baptist congregation in order to telegraph to evangelical voters that he was one of us—at least marginally. I saw through the hoax, but it worked. Both improved his lot with my folks.
The night before the senator announced his running mate at a rally, one of his advisors called and told me to get to Dayton, because McCain was going to reveal that his vice presidential pick was Alaska governor Sarah Palin. When Palin entered the race, evangelicals breathed a sigh of relief. We already knew she had spent her teen years in an Assemblies of God church, was involved with the well-known and much-celebrated Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and as an adult attended an independent Bible Church, quintessentially evangelical. She was also solid on all the moral issues we worried McCain had no vested interest in, particularly abortion.
More than fifteen thousand people, myself among them, watched McCain introduce the governor as “a running mate who can best help me shake up Washington.” The crowd went crazy. Sarah’s husband, Todd, stood next to her, cradling their four-month-old baby boy, Trig, who has Down syndrome. When so many justified abortion due to abnormalities, I thought of families like the Palins for whom such a child is one of God’s great gifts. I appreciated the emotional cost of the Palins’ loving care, and it impressed me greatly.
After remarks by the two candidates, the McCain campaign invited me to the stage with other strategically selected supporters. I congratulated Senator McCain, telling him he made a brilliant choice and that millions of others would feel the same way. Suddenly this ticket was not just the lesser of two evils but the promise of something special. There was a great deal of talk among my peers about how the prospect of an evangelical vice president with a visible faith and clear moral compass could ease the pain of a less-than-perfect president.
The dramatic backdrop of the country’s financial crisis added to the tremendous sense of insecurity my community felt about the future of our country. Small-town churches that I visited on those three Sundays out of four, were grappling with economic forces beyond anyone’s comprehension. How could retirement investments have just disappeared? How could the rock-solid value of homes, the brick-and-mortar security that generations relied on, evaporate? What had happened to American leadership? In all my regular churches, ones I would see at least annually—in Illinois, Kansas, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Alabama, and Oklahoma—people told me over and over how anxious they were about the state of the world and of humanity, what their children and grandchildren would inherit, especially as they were engulfed by the financial crisis and the specter of Barack Hussein Obama, whom they believed was a crypto-Muslim, running for president. These typical generational worries had escalated into crippling anxiety over the prospect of impending eschatological catastrophes, religious persecution, Armageddon-scale warfare, and the emergence of a terrifying Antichrist. If the supposed Muslim Democratic candidate succeeded, it seemed that Christian America was doomed.
These voters were the consumers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, and an array of conservative religious broadcasters who diligently alerted my constituents, hour by hour, to the endless onslaught of dangers to our personal safety, to the welfare of our children and grandchildren, to the peace and security of our country, to our freedom to worship God, educate our children in the Bible, and pray in public. Obama’s liberal social scheming and secret intention to institute Sharia as the law of the land would undermine all the progress we had made in the Bush years. But we were powerless to stop his momentum, and Obama was eventually elected the president of the United States.
On the morning after the election, sitting in my office on Capitol Hill, I fielded messages and phone calls that ranged from grim political despair to real paranoia. A longtime pastor and close friend called to announce that we had just elected the first Marxist president. Then came the steady stream of other calls: about Obama’s birth certificate, his Muslim religion, his shadowy background, his possible identity as the Antichrist—or at least an Antichrist. “He’s going to destroy this country,” one of my biggest financial backers lamented, going on to tell me Islam would now become the national religion and, in order to survive, we’d be paying a special tax as ransom to jihadists. While I understood why they were afraid, I never bought completely into the most extreme of their fears. I knew Obama had had two Muslim fathers, but I also knew they had been nonreligious revolutionaries—the opposite of jihadis. I also knew by now that, while Obama’s Christianity was woefully deficient, he was a Christian—probably in name only, but he couldn’t join a church and remain Muslim.
As I sat recovering from the wave of frantic phone messages, a more welcome call came in from a friend, Reverend Kenneth Barney of the New Antioch Baptist Church in Randallstown, Maryland. Ken was the pastor of one of the most significant black churches in the metropolitan D.C. area, and someone I had known and admired for years. He delivered the keynote address at one of our National Memorials for the Pre-Born, and he had even traveled with me to Morocco. I was always conscious that our politics were at odds, but we always agreed completely on the paramount moral issues.
After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Ken got to the point and correctly observed that it was likely not a good day for me. I acknowledged he was right. Then he solemnly pronounced that it was a great day for him. Given that we had similar views on abortion, on same-sex marriage, on the need for more, not less, public acknowledgment of God, this confused me. He continued to oppose Obama’s take on these things, he carefully explained, but then went on to say why he was celebrating.
He told me that all his life he had been instructed that when in the presence of a white man, he was to look at the floor because he was not his equal. His children and grandchildren grew up in different times, but still, they knew some parts of their dreams would never come true. Now, for the first time in their lives, their father and their grandfather could stand straight up and look white men in the eye as equals.
“That’s why I’m celebrating today,” he said, slowly and deliberately, in his rich baritone voice. “Today I am as much of a man as you are. I know you can appreciate that, my friend.”
I was speechless. I never dreamed Ken and I did anything but look each other in the eye, but that morning I began to understand the monumental significance of Obama’s victory for so many people of color. Until that conversation, I believed that because of my experience with anti-Semitism, I was racially sensitive. As a kid, I had been called a “kike.” When I visited some congregations, there would be the occasional dig about Jews and money. In the South, I was once introduced in the pulpit by a pastor as his “favorite Jew boy.” Still, the marginalization I had felt because of my Jewish heritage was mild compared to the crippling dehumanization that Ken and his entire people had experienced. This was a long-overdue validation of their very humanity.
Ken’s words humbled me, and I told him so. From that conversation, the two-dimensional, dichotomized Republican-versus-Democrat, conservative-versus-liberal presidency would slowly become something far more complex and multifaceted to me. I had to face the reality that I had violated a core evangelical tenet—in John 3:16—that God so loved the whole world and every person who has ever lived, and that is why “he gave his only begotten Son.” In all my work, culminating in my visceral reaction to Barack Obama, I had self-righteously questioned whether God could really love liberals like Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and countless others who opposed us, because their political beliefs appeared so patently hostile to God’s moral will.
As I sat prayerfully ruminating, I came to the conclusion that, of course God loved all these people. Transient earthly concerns did not negate the fact that they were all wonders of his creation. But even if I could come to terms with the enormity of this realization, it was and would continue to be a solitary experience. The people around me had no interest in exploring, much less bridging, this gap between what we said we believed as Christians and what we practiced. Soul-searching was for navel-gazing liberals. God wasn’t interested in our looking inward but in our looking outward, to the crazy world around us that was spinning out of control. I returned to Psalm 139, a favorite of pro-lifers because of its reference to the child in the womb, and reexamined what it had come to mean for me. Its ending now seemed personal: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me . . .”