Obama and the Paradoxes of Progressive Christianity: An Interview with James Kloppenberg | Religion & Politics
On March 27-29, scholars gathered in St. Louis, Missouri, at the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics for the conference “Beyond the Culture Wars: Recasting Religion and Politics in the Twentieth Century.” At the pinnacle of the three-day event, James T. Kloppenberg delivered the keynote lecture, entitled “Barack Obama and the Paradoxes of Progressive Christianity.”
Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. His lecture drew on his 2011 book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition. An intellectual historian of the United States and Europe, Kloppenberg’s current projects include two forthcoming books, Tragic Irony: The Rise of Democracy in European and American Thought and The American Democratic Tradition: Roger Williams to Barack Obama.
During his visit, Kloppenberg sat down with R&P Managing Editor Tiffany Stanley for an interview. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
R&P: How did you decide to write Reading Obama, a project analyzing the president’s own writings and speeches and archives?
JK: I was in England teaching at the University of Cambridge as the Pitt Professor of American History. Part of holding that professorship is accepting invitations to visit universities to give talks. I was working on a big history of democratic theory in Europe and America. I had a couple of talks in place that I would propose to people, then I would say, “Well I know there’s a lot of interest in the new president. Would you like a paper on eighteenth-century democratic theory, or would you like me to talk about Obama?” And almost everybody asked me to talk about Obama. When I was coming back to the U.S. for a symposium on the presidential election, knowing I would be giving talks on Obama, I reread Dreams from My Father on the way here and read The Audacity of Hope on the way back. I was impressed by how good those books were, so I began looking around to find what analyses had been done of his writings. I found almost nothing. The assumption was that Dreams from My Father was just something you would do if you had been elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, which is what they call the editor of the review, and that The Audacity of Hope was a campaign book of the sort that every politician writes. I’ve read a fair number of those campaign books. The Audacity of Hope is very different. The depth of analysis, the self-awareness that was present, the understanding of the issues of American history—in the way that academic historians understand American history—all of that struck me as extraordinary. I began looking more into Obama’s intellectual formation, and by the time I got back to the U.S. at the end of my year in Cambridge, I was committed to doing something more than just a version of the talk I had given a number of times. At that point I began interviewing the people who had taught Obama, the people who had worked with him, the people who had known him at different stages in his life, and this picture of him as this deeply thoughtful moderate who saw all sides of all issues began to fall into place. I kept hearing the same thing from people who had known him in many different situations and many different stages of his life. At that point, I thought, I’ve got something to say that I haven’t seen in anything else that’s been written about him.
R&P: It sounds like, from the updated introduction, that even after the book came out, you heard from so many people that said, “Yes, you got him. This is it.”
JK: That was very satisfying. The comment that a couple of people have made—again, I must be inoculated against cynicism—was that, “Of course the people who come to you are going to say, ‘You got him right.’ What are they going to say?” But I don’t think that’s true. These were people who were going out of their way to contact me to let me know, and they didn’t have to do that. If they thought it was wrong…
R&P: They could let you know that too.
JK: That’s right. I haven’t heard from a single person that this portrait doesn’t fit the person they know. And that’s true of people who disagree with everything he stands for as well as people who are on his side, people on the far left and people on the far right. Some of them are frustrated by the fact that he is so moderate, and so cerebral, that he is so inclined to think about all sides. I refer to one of the people who was in his Senate office, who said, “It drove us crazy that he always wanted to know every side of every question before he would take a position. We would just say, ‘Barack, decide!’ And he would say, ‘Well, I don’t quite have enough information yet.’” That’s not the way most politicians operate; they know the answer before they get the question. And he was the opposite.
R&P: One of the things that I thought was striking was, as you note, Obama calls himself a Christian and a skeptic. What does he mean by that?
JK: I think we have an understanding in twenty-first century America of what Christianity is that seems to be extremely thin. I grew up in a conservative Catholic family, and I have spent a fair amount of time reading in the literature of Christianity. I’m persuaded by Christian theologians who argue it has been from the very beginning a deeply contested tradition. The attempts to establish a particular theology as the single authentic Christian version strike me as unconvincing. The tradition comes into being through this set of texts that are internally inconsistent. There are all sorts of contestations within the Scriptures of Christianity. I think of the tradition of Christian skepticism as a very old tradition, a tradition of people who are as aware of and concerned with their doubt as they are committed to their faith. I think that’s the kind of Christianity that Obama found at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church of Christ, and I think that’s what appealed to him. Last night I quoted a comment that Jeremiah Wright made to Obama’s biographer, David Remnick. Wright said to him, “He came to Trinity not just looking for a social gospel but looking for a church that didn’t put other people down.” That sense of Christians as people on a quest, and that quest taking them in different directions, and different people choosing different worlds for themselves is something that I think appealed to Obama and is consistent with the way you would expect from the son of cultural anthropologist to think. He understands that the different cultures in human history have had different orientations toward values. He finally found in Jeremiah Wright’s church a way of thinking that made sense to him, and he uses that phrase, “I felt the spirit of God beckoning to me” with reference to his experience in Trinity Church.” I think it’s pretty powerful. It’s the sort of conversion story that you get in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and I think it’s similar to the experience that Obama himself had.
R&P: This faith and doubt—is that part of the paradox of progressive Christianity, the phrase from your keynote last night? Is that tension part of the paradox?
JK: I think so. It prevents you ever from resting easy in your faith, and to some people that doesn’t sound like religious faith at all, because to them, religious faith is a rock. Nothing changes. That’s true for many people, but is it true for everyone? In most religious traditions there are always people who are asking questions, people who want to unsettle what other people take to be dogma. And it does seems to me as though that is a part of the Christian tradition that, although it has not received very much attention in the United States in recent decades, is older than most forms of dogmatic Christianity. And I think there has been a conversation about what Christianity means from the very outset, and I think that notion of a conversation that continues is the conception of the Christian tradition that Obama himself embraces.
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