Theologian Helps Obama Find His Religious Voice

Shaun Casey, a religious adviser for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, was on a family trip to California in March when he got word — he was a pinhead.

At least, that was what he was christened by Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly.

Just days before, Casey had been enlisted by the Obama campaign to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America to defend the candidate in the wake of controversial comments made by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. O’Reilly called the defense “nonsense” and “B.S.” before saying Obama “needs to explain the situation himself, not that pinhead.”

Casey — who, by the way, has a normally shaped head — laughed off the insult, yesterday calling it a “badge of honor,” during a stop in Nashville for the Christian Scholars Conference at Lipscomb University, where he will speak at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday.

His three graduate degrees from Harvard University (Master of Divinity, Doctorate of Theology and Master of Public Administration) tend to suggest a broader intellectual capacity. He also is in a key position during what many, including Nashville author Stephen Mansfield, believe is an important shift in the way religion influences national politics.

“The ‘Religious Left’ is finding its voice, so to speak,” said Mansfield, a former pastor and self-described pro-life conservative whose new book, The Faith of Barack Obama, will be released in August.

“There has always been a Religious Left,” he said. “That’s what Martin Luther King Jr. would have been. … But it’s never really had a strong national voice. Now it’s finding that voice in Obama.”

Casey is one of the people who helps Obama find that voice when it comes to religion. As “Senior Adviser for Religious Affairs,” he tells Obama whom to talk to and how to talk to them; he is not a personal spiritual adviser.

“I think the person who wins the presidency is usually the person who tells the best story,” Casey said. “Faith is part of Barack Obama’s compelling story. … It’s a much more compelling religious story than we’ve seen from Democrats in the past.”

Obama, who became a Christian as an adult in the late 1980s, has a small group of campaign staffers who advise him on religion and do religious outreach, and he is the first Democrat to have such a staff during the primary season, said Casey, whose interests range from the ethics of war to some Americans’ quasi-religious devotion to baseball.

There is a sense, he said, that many religious voters previously taken for granted by Republicans are now up for grabs.

“I think we’ve seen the peak of the Religious Right,” Casey said. “It’s not clear how large the Religious Left is; only time will tell. It’s certainly more vibrant and active now. But it’s really the center of the evangelical world where the most seismic move is taking place, where people are saying, ‘I’m not comfortable with the James Dobsons, the Pat Robertsons. They don’t speak for me.’”

In the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush overwhelmingly beat John Kerry among white evangelicals, but Casey thinks that gap is closing in large part because of dissatisfaction with Bush’s leadership and ambivalence toward presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

Different issues are moving to the forefront for religious voters as issues such as abortion and gay marriage become less decisive, he said.

According to Mansfield, Obama is going to talk about poverty, about the oppressed, he’s going to talk about the injustice of the war and he’s going to talk about care for immigrants, but the religious element is in there.

“He’s oriented toward those social-justice issues, [where] most conservative evangelicals think in terms of two real strong moral values when it comes to politics: homosexuality and abortion,” Mansfield said. “But social-justice liberals who are also evangelicals will say, ‘But there’s more than that. Poverty is also a moral issue. War is a moral issue. The environment is a moral issue.’ They would say it’s not one party being moral and the other party being immoral. It’s each party representing certain moral positions and you having to choose which of those moral positions are more important to you.”

The battle for moderate evangelical votes is particularly important in Tennessee, where 51 percent of the population self-identifies as evangelical Protestant, according to a recent poll by The Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life.

Gray Sasser, chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, said he was encouraged by the job Obama has done addressing issues of concern to religious voters in the state, such as providing affordable health care, improving schools and protecting the environment.

“We’re not going to concede the faith vote to Republicans,” he said, “and I don’t think Republicans can take for granted that people of faith are going to vote in the Republican column.”

Still, Casey said, it is unrealistic to expect Obama to win a majority of evangelical voters, but he should do better than Kerry did in 2004. The importance of religion to Obama may earn him a second look from conservative Christians, he said, but it’s unclear whether that will translate into votes and victories in traditionally ‘red’ states.