powell the also coulda woulda ran ('til he put his eggs int the bush basket) and stephen carter, muse.

when i see obama, i hear carter, and i'm not in thrall. obama's tack is part wind, part jib. he is not so much a man of democratic principle as a man of his times -- a professional, bourgieos politician -- willing to exploit the technology of evangelicalism.

i've gone to reread carter, the author of Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby and The Culture of Disbelief, in particular, to trace the spirit of obama's new tent love. recall that in 1993, carter was a yale law professor and obama, fresh from hahvad, was teaching at Chicago. coupla slicks, them two, waiting to explode.

from the print

Still, the central point bears stressing: ther is nothing wrong and much right with letting religious faith be the wellspring of a citizen's public action. At the same time, one whose moral judgements are driven by religious devotion must be ever careful to discern whether God's word or human politics is doing the work. For there is a vital difference between a political inspiration that is fired by one's deepest religious beliefs and a claim of religious belief that is fired by a preexisting political commitment.
...
In this sense -- as the servant of politics -- religion is very much in the public square. It might be supposed that this appeal to the will of God in support of nearly every cause is evidence of the exalted position of religion in our culture. But it is evidence of the opposite. By calling upon the word of God in service of every known cause, our society diminishes the weight an force of religious belief.  Indeed, by readily supposing that the word of God is so lalleable that it can (by coincidence) support every cause that one's politics also happen to support, we undermine the idea of faith as a source of moral guidance.

This is the essence of the problem of political preaching, as I have named the effort to use God's name to bend one's flock to the correct political view. It is the problem with George Bush's effort to link God to America's victory in the Cold War, and it is the problem with much that passes for liberation theology. ...

A principle theme of this book, of course, has been that there is nothing wrong when a religious group presses its moral claims in the public square.

you see, obama's revivalism is going nowhere, too, but around a circle that liberals and democratic rank n file have been trying to escape.

enough with social experiments to assimilate christian fundamentalist agenda in gubment and law.