Fox News Radio Interview With Alan Colmes
Pastor Joel talks with Alan Colmes about the new creation care documentary, Our Father's World (www.ourfathersworldfilm.com).
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Joel Hunter's 'Our Father's World' Documentary: Christians Must Stop Neglecting Environment
Our Father's World from Northland Church on Vimeo.
Dr. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of the 15,000-member Northland church in Florida, has released a new documentary titled "Our Father's World," where he reminds Christians that God made people stewards, not owners of the planet, and that environmental issues are Christian issues.
"Scientific evidence now is very much backing up the Scriptural mandate that we need to take care of this Earth. All of the credible scientific organizations of the world are showing the degree to which the environment is being harmed by our pollution, by the disobedience to the first commandment that He (God) gave us," Hunter says.
The 26-minute long documentary is available for viewing and download free online, and includes interviews with leading evangelical scholars, including Bill and Lynne Hybels, Tony Campolo, James Merritt and Mark Liederbach.
One of the main points made in the film is that many Christians seem turned off by the environmental movement because they believe it has been hijacked by political ideals.
"Many Christians still see environmental stewardship as a political issue, rather than seeing it as a biblical issue. Scripture clearly teaches us to be good stewards of our finances, time, talents and relationships, and the church is beginning to realize there is another form of stewardship that we have neglected to embrace," says Raymond Randall, leader of Northland's Creation Care Team.
Caring for the planet is one of the very first commandments God gave to man, Pastor Hunter reminds viewers.
"This was our first calling, recorded early on in Genesis 1 and 2, and we remain God's caretakers over all creation today," Hunter explains.
The documentary reminds viewers that the Earth, its creatures and its resources do not belong to people – they belong to God, and humans are called to be stewards of creation and to protect it, not exploit it and destroy it.
"I don't know why this issue is so complicated from a biblical standpoint. Those of us who are Christians believe that God created the Earth. We don't believe that the Bible is a book of science, it doesn't exactly tell us how He created it but certainly throughout the Bible, we read of God's relationship with creation, that he was that life force that brought it all into being in the beginning, that He said it was good," says Hybels, co-founder of Ten for Congo, an advocate group spreading awareness about the hardships people face in Congo.
"He called us to have dominion, to rule, to subdue it, to till it, to work it, and a lot of people have taken that to mean that we can dominate and rule in a harsh way."
Despite God's clear message to believers, many people today have chosen to ignore or dismiss that calling, the film says, which has led to huge environmental problems, including deforestation, the destruction of habitats and the extinction and endangerment of many species.
Bob Giguere, the Emmy and Telly award-winning director of "Our Father's World," insists that environmental issues are not a concern only for the secular world, a message that the film drives forward hard.
"I know many Christians who commonly mistake environmental responsibility as a task for the secular world," Giguere says. "Upon seeing this film, it should be obvious that the Christian walk can be a very green path."
Apathy toward the environment does not simply impact wildlife and nature; poor communities around the world are hit hard when they lose access to natural resources that they greatly depend on to survive.
"A growing number of evangelical Christians worldwide are uniting in their belief that environmentalism is not merely a moral obligation. It's a matter of justice for the poor and for the generations to come," Giguere stresses.
In "Our Father's World," Hunter calls on Christians and people of all faiths and backgrounds to unite and take meaningful steps to truly become stewards of the planet.
"God has given us problems so big, that not one faith community can solve on its own. Therefore, we need to work together, and we need to find common ground, both with believers of other religions and with those who believe in no religion," the Northland pastor urges.
"Biblical justice is social justice, and it calls for interfaith cooperation."
"Our Father's World" is "ideally suited for presentation at churches and study groups," a press release noted.
White House Names New Faith-Based Office Director
The White House announced today President Obama's appointment of Melissa Rogers to serve as the new director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and special assistant to the president.
In this capacity, Rogers will provide President Obama with spiritual support and guidance, and assist the Administration in its efforts to collaborate with faith-based and nonprofit organizations throughout the country.
Rogers previously chaired the president's Inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. In this capacity, Rogers collaborated with members of the Council to adopt consensus recommendations regarding ways in which the federal government could strengthen its partnerships with religious and secular nonprofit organizations that serve people in need.
Joel Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed in Florida and who was a member of President Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, said of Rogers, "She worked diligently [as Council chair] to find common ground. Melissa has a gift for crafting the kind of language that maintains clear boundaries but promotes cooperation."
He continued, "I may differ with Rogers on certain policy and legal issues but I have faith that she will always listen to a variety of views and make sure they are accurately conveyed.
"Melissa is an honest broker, a consensus-builder, and a problem-solver, and someone who believes that government should be actively engaged with civil society, including religious institutions and individuals, to promote the common good. I look forward to her service in the White House."
In 2010, Obama issued an executive order that embraced the council's recommendations, and one of Rogers' tasks will be to implement that order across a range of federally funded programs.
Rogers, who is known for reaching across ideological, political and religious lines to gain consensus on collaborative projects to promote the common good, recently led a common ground project that resulted in the publication of Religious Expression in American Public Life: A Joint Statement of Current Law.
This consensus statement was drafted by a diverse group of religious and civil liberties leaders on the state of current law: signatories included staff from Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice to former staff of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Rogers also collaborated with religious and political leaders in a project called Come Let Us Reason, in which a group of Christian evangelicals and political progressives sought and found important common ground on issues, such as nondiscrimination, ending torture, reducing the number of abortions, and reforming our immigration system.
In February, Obama announced Joshua DuBois' departure as head of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a position he held since 2009.
During his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., Obama thanked DuBois for his stewardship and service to him during the past four years. "This morning, I want to publicly thank Joshua for all that he's done, and I know that everybody joins me in wishing him all the best in his future endeavors – including getting married," Obama said.
The president also thanked the 30-year-old aide for sending him a daily devotional every morning via email, "a snippet of Scripture for me to reflect on." Obama added that, "it has meant the world to me."
DuBois, who's credited with helping the Democrats establish a progressive faith movement, was 26 when he started working for the Obama presidential campaign. He now teaches at New York University and plans to author a book of devotionals for leaders, based on the ones he sent the president each day.
The Pentecostal minister sparked controversy last year when he defended the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that would require all insurance companies to supply contraceptives and abortifacients, even to employees who work for religious institutions and organizations that are opposed to both.
However, he was also a staunch defender of Pastor Louie Giglio, who was scheduled to deliver the benediction at Obama's inauguration, but whose appearance was canceled by the Inauguration Committee after a decade old sermon delivered by the pastor surfaced, in which he stated the biblical view of homosexuality.
Prior to working for Obama as a senate aide and then the religious affairs director for the Obama campaign, DuBois worked for Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), was a fellow for former Congressman Charles Holt (D-N.J.), and served as an associate pastor for a small Pentecostal church in Massachusetts.
DuBois said in a statement regarding his successor, "I have known Melissa Rogers for years, as chair of President Obama's faith-based advisory council, as one of the nation's leading experts on religion and public life, and as a close and dear friend. There is no better person to lead the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and bring the federal government into deeper, effective and constitutional partnership with faith-based and other nonprofit groups around the country."
The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (formerly the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) was established in 2001 by former President George W. Bush, who used his first executive order to create the initiative, which was established with the aim of increasing government-funded social service grants to faith-based organizations that are improving the lives of those who live in their communities.
By Melissa Barnhart, Christian Post. Find this article at: http://www.christianpost.com/news/white-house-names-new-faith-based-office-director-91781/
Joel Hunter’s environmental documentary seeks to inspire Christians, avoid controversy
Evangelical mega-church pastor Joel Hunter has never been afraid of controversy. He’s taken bold positions on a range of topics throughout the years and has been attacked by some for serving as a spiritual advisor to President Obama. But as he and his media team release a new documentary urging Christians to care for creation, they seek to sidestep the scandal and opt instead for inspiration.
The film is titled “Our Father’s World” and features a wide range of evangelical influencers including, Tony Campolo, Bill and Lynne Hybels, Matthew Sleeth, and Mark Liederbach, a Southern Baptist seminary professor. The video was carefully developed over several years, and you’ll notice that a younger version of me and my father, James Merritt, even make a couple of appearances throughout. At the time, I had just released my own book on the matter–Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet.
But the sweeping array of voices featured is not the only attempt to unify. The film takes particular care to avoid more divisive topics, such as climate change. Instead, the film makes the case for Christians to reengage an issue that, according to the Bible, is their God-given responsibility.
“One of the things that evangelicals are very afraid of, and legitimately so, is that in our reticence, we have allowed the New Age movement to hijack the environmentalist movement and make it their own. The result is that the minute we start talking about environmentalism, evangelicals begin to say, ‘Hey you sound like a New Ager,’” Tony Campolo says in the film. “The fact that the New Age people have committed themselves to some thing that really belongs to the church does not mean that the church should not be involved in this.”
By Jonathan Merritt.
Find this article at: http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2013/03/20/joel-hunters-environmental-documentary-seeks-to-inspire-christians-avoid-controversy/
White House Director of Faith-Based Office Is Leaving His Post
President Obama announced on Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington that Joshua DuBois, the young pastor he appointed four years ago to lead the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, would step down on Friday.
Mr. DuBois played a central role when Mr. Obama was making his first run for the presidency, cultivating relationships on his behalf with religious leaders of many faiths. Mr. DuBois, 30, has also served as an unofficial in-house pastor to Mr. Obama, sending the president an e-mail each morning with Bible passages intended to prompt reflection or prayer.
At the prayer breakfast, the president called Mr. DuBois a “close friend of mine and yours” who “has been at my side — in work and in prayer — for years now.”
He continued, “Every morning he sends me via e-mail a daily meditation — a snippet of Scripture for me to reflect on. And it has meant the world to me. And despite my pleas, tomorrow will be his last day in the White House.”
The faith-based office was started by President George W. Bush at the beginning of his first term, which proved contentious because many critics said the office and its actions often violated the constitutional separation of church and state. But Mr. Obama preserved the office and appointed advisory councils that represented a broad range of religious leaders, including conservative evangelicals and openly gay ministers.
Mr. DuBois, a black Pentecostal minister, steered the office toward engaging religious leaders to address broad social goals like reducing unwanted pregnancies, helping people cope with the economic downturn, encouraging fathers to take responsibility for their children and improving child and maternal health.
Some of the most prickly First Amendment issues facing the faith-based office were never resolved under Mr. DuBois’s tenure, most notably the question of whether religious organizations can receive government funding and still discriminate in hiring. The office last year released a report that did not propose definitive policies.
A White House official said that Mr. DuBois planned to teach at New York University, and would create an organization to help government, nonprofit and private institutions develop partnerships with religious groups to solve social problems. He will work with Michael Wear, his former assistant and the director of faith outreach for Mr. Obama’s second presidential campaign.
With Mr. Obama’s blessing, Mr. DuBois will also write a book of devotionals for leaders, based on those he sent to the president.
The Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the senior pastor of Northland, a network of churches based in Longwood, Fla., said that he observed significant changes in the faith-based office after Mr. Obama inherited it from Mr. Bush.
“Before it was basically about which organizations got funded,” said Mr. Hunter, who served on the first faith-based advisory council appointed by Mr. Obama. He said that Mr. DuBois focused on connecting religious leaders with policy makers, adding, “What has resulted is this accessibility to policy conversations by faith communities that really wasn’t there before.”
But the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who served on a task force at the faith-based office, said that Mr. DuBois’s tenure was “a lost opportunity to fix real constitutional problems,” such as government financing of religious organizations that discriminate in hiring or that serve the public in overtly religious settings.
FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/us/politics/white-house-director-of-faith-based-initiatives-will-step-down.html?_r=1&
Rev. Joel Hunter: Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast Message Marks a Shift
President Obama struck a humble tone at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Rev. Joel Hunter said on Thursday [Feb. 7, 2013]. The senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed said the President spoke less of his own faith as he has in the past and more about the role of humility in leadership. “We must keep that same humility that Dr. King and Lincoln and Washington and all our great leaders understood is at the core of true leadership,” Obama said in his speech. The president began his address by announcing that his head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Joshua DuBois, will leave his position on Friday. Ben Carson, a pediatric surgeon at Johns Hopkins University and a Seventh Day Adventist, was the keynote speaker at the breakfast.
Video from Odyssey Networks.
WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s use of Scripture has elements of Lincoln, King
President Obama will publicly take the oath of office with Bibles once owned by his political heroes, Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One Bible was well read, but cited cautiously. The other granted scriptural sanction to the civil rights movement.
When Obama lifts his hands from the Bibles and turns to deliver his second inaugural address on Monday (Jan. 21), his own approach to Scripture will come into view. Characteristically, it sits somewhere between the former president and famous preacher.
His faith forged in the black church, Obama draws deeply on its blending of biblical narratives with contemporary issues such as racism and poverty. But like Lincoln, Obama also acknowledges that Americans sometimes invoke the same Bible to argue past each other, and that Scripture itself counsels against sanctimony.
Obama articulated this view most clearly in a 2006 speech, saying that secularists shouldn’t bar believers from the public square, but neither should people of faith expect America to be one vast amen corner.
“He understands that you can appeal to people on religious grounds,” said Jeffrey Siker, a theology professor at Loyola Marymount University in California who has studied Obama’s speeches. “But you also have to be able to translate your case into arguments that people of different faiths, or no faith, can grasp.”
Florida megachurch pastor Joel Hunter, a close spiritual adviser to the president, said Obama often starts the day by reading Scripture.
One “great source of encouragement in my life,” Obama has said, is Isaiah 40:31: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
Obama seldom attends church since moving into the White House but occasionally alludes to his private faith in public speeches. More often, he cites Scripture to connect with traditions and arguments familiar to most Americans, if only faintly.
“He is a leader who wants to approach challenges from many different aspects of our lives,” Hunter said. “Not just intellectual, but also moral, and he finds Scripture to be a way of communicating values that many of us share.”
Like many liberal Protestants, Obama often emphasizes Bible passages that urge compassion for the poor and downtrodden.
“He uses those Scriptures more than any other type,” said Hunter. “It has to do with assisting those in need, rather than moral commands about sin,” Hunter said.
As Hunter notes, occupying the bully pulpit gives presidents license to cite Scripture, and Obama is far from the first to use it.
Bill Clinton alluded to the Psalms while asking for forgiveness during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and George W. Bush cited Scripture to forge a personal connection with evangelical Christians.
Obama uses the Bible a bit more broadly.
He has quoted the Sermon on the Mount to explain his economic views, read Psalms to bereaved families in Newtown, Conn., and Tucson, Ariz., and cited the Bible’s Golden Rule to explain his evolving support for same-sex marriage.
During his 2009 inaugural address, Obama cited the Apostle Paul’s admonition to “set aside childish things,” challenging the country to tackle its complex problems.
“Any time anybody quotes Scripture, they are implicitly saying: If you are a person of faith, this is what God is telling us to do,” said Siker.
But like Lincoln, Obama has also used the Bible for the opposite purpose — to argue that no one fully knows the divine design.
“The full breadth of human knowledge is like a grain of sand in God’s hands,” Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2011. “And there are some mysteries in this world we cannot fully comprehend. As it’s written in Job,’God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways. He does great things beyond our understandings.’”
Of course, not everyone agrees with Obama’s interpretation of Scripture.
Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has accused Obama of “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.” Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Obama has a “phony theology ... not a theology based on the Bible.”
But nothing upset conservatives quite like Obama’s citation of the Bible to back same-sex marriage. Even Hunter criticized the president. “You can’t cite one Scripture to interpret or negate other Scriptures,” he said. “But I know for him that was a moral decision.”
That’s precisely why Obama drew on the Bible, said Mary Frances Berry, co-author of “Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches, from the State House to the White House.”
“What he wants is to have moral authority. Not just to be president, but to have moral authority,” Berry said. “That’s in the black tradition. We talk about the preacher as having moral authority: the ability to convince your audience of the rightness of what you are saying.”
In that tradition, Obama sometimes bookends big speeches with Scripture, Berry said, wedging a challenging message in between.
Despite Obama’s later estrangement from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he learned at the feet of a rhetorical master, said Martha Simmons, co-editor of “Preaching with Sacred Fire,” an anthology of African-American sermons.
Among the skills Obama gleaned at Trinity UCC is the ability to draw modern messages from ancient texts, and to condense that message into a memorable phrase. It’s called “shorthanding” Scripture, Simmons said.
For example, Obama frequently used the expression “we are our brother’s keeper” during his 2008 presidential campaign. Some evangelicals were perplexed at the citation, noting that it comes from the mouth of Cain, history’s most famous fratricide.
But the message, which Obama used to argue against excessive individualism, made perfect sense to African-Americans, said Simmons. “He was doing what the black community does: understanding the relevancy of the text for our modern context.”
One more rhetorical tact Obama learned from the black church, especially from King: Orators can challenge their audience, but should always end on an uplifting note.
“When all is said and done,” Simmons said, “you leave people with a hopeful word.”
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FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/obamas-use-of-scripture-has-elements-of-lincoln-king/2013/01/16/869efbac-601b-11e2-9dc9-bca76dd777b8_story.html
The new evangelicals: A return to the original agenda of Christ
I am one of those evangelicals who, in Professor Marcia Pally’s words, have “left the right.” As a former President-elect of the Christian Coalition of America, I resigned that position and all other positions that would box me into ideologies that were becoming insidiously narrow and negative. As a 64-year-old pastor, I may not yet be representative of my generation or profession in my political openness, but I am one of a growing number of white evangelicals who are making biblically-based decisions on an issue-by-issue basis, in a wider circle of conversations than ever. We are put off by the “hardening of the categories” that is stifling not only intellectually, but also spiritually. Part of this transition is cultural. As Professor Pally pointed out, it is not only a generational shift that naturally declares independence from traditional religious reactions (especially paternalistic ones). The transition is for others a distancing from the institutionalism of the church and the inelasticity of a movement that began as personally charitable but has become dogmatically xenophobic.
The greater part of this change, however, is a generic return to the original agenda of Christ. As the world becomes more complex and less predictable, we are seeing a “back to basics” trend. It is an expansion beyond a preoccupation with the more recent monitoring of sexual matters, to a more ‘whole life’ helpfulness. It is the turn from accusation to compassion, and it is much in keeping with the priorities and example of Jesus. His focus on helping the most vulnerable is also our concern. Thus more and more evangelicals are expanding the definition of pro-life. They are including in a pro-life framework concern with poverty, environmental pollution, AIDS treatment, and more. And issues like abortion are being expanded from focusing on only “in utero” concerns—increasing numbers of evangelicals now see prevention of unwanted pregnancy and support for needy expectant mothers as pro-life.
More evangelicals simply want to live our lives according to our spiritual values—unselfishness, other-centeredness, non-presumptuousness—so that when people see “our good works, they will give glory to our Father in heaven.”
Lastly, practically all sustainable change is relationally based. In an increasingly connected world, an increasing number of evangelicals are developing a broader range of relationships, both interfaith and inter-lifestyle. These make us think twice before we declare those who have different values as adversaries. As we “love our neighbor,” we want to cooperate in ways that express our own values while allowing others to express their own.
Professor Pally has established a masterful and nuanced summary of the change in the evangelical political voice. I hope that we will continue the dialogue.
FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/01/16/a-return-to-the-original-agenda-of-christ/
Pastor Joel Hunter Named to Orlando Sentinel's "25 Most Powerful" List of Leaders
" ... 15. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed. (Last year: Not ranked.) Hunter, 64, is the first religious leader to ever make this list. He's widely respected locally. And nationally, he's known for having prayed with presidents Obama and Bush. Hunter's thoughtful and serious approach to faith continues to attract thousands every week to his Longwood-based congregation."
In Obama's First Term, an Evolving Christian Faith and a More Evangelical Style
VIEW FULL ARTICLE AND PICTURES AT: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/27/in-obamas-first-term-an-evolving-christian-faith-and-a-more-evangelical-style/
Washington (CNN) - President Obama's prayers for a strong first debate may not have been answered, but that doesn't mean the prayers weren't happening.
Before he stepped onto a Colorado stage earlier this month to face off with Mitt Romney for the first time, Obama joined a conference call with a small circle of Christian ministers.
"The focus of that prayer was, 'Oh, Lord, you know precisely what the president needs to say,'" says Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megachurch pastor from Texas who helped lead the call. "'You know what this country needs during the next four years.'"
"'And so I would pray that your primary will and words that you want the president to say will fall from his lips,'" Caldwell goes on, recalling his prayer.
Obama, for his part, was mostly silent.
"There's a profound and genuine humility in the presence of Christ himself," Caldwell says, describing the president on such calls. "I think he recognizes it as a holy moment."
It was the second time Caldwell and Obama had prayed by phone in as many months. The two had connected in August on a prayer call Obama has hosted on his birthday every year since coming to the White House.
Welcome to the intense, out-of-the-box and widely misunderstood religious life of President Barack Obama.
Though he famously left his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the year he was elected to the presidency, a handful of spiritual advisers close to Obama say that his time in office has significantly deepened his faith.
Stephen Mansfield, a former Christian pastor who wrote the book "The Faith of Barack Obama," goes so far to say that Obama has experienced a spiritual transformation.
"I think we do have at heart a new man, so to speak," says Mansfield, who worked closely with the White House and with some Obama religious advisers on his book. "He has undergone a pretty significant personal religious change in his first term."
Obama's faith advisers say Mansfield goes a step too far, though they acknowledge that when it comes to his faith, Obama has changed.
"There is a deepening development in his relationship with God," says Joel Hunter, a Florida-based pastor who has been in touch with Obama nearly every week since he took office. "He chooses to stay faithful in daily habits of study and prayer and consistent times of interchange with spiritual leaders."
"I am not sure he did that before he came to the presidency."
Whether or not Obama has been spiritually "reborn" in the evangelical sense, his spiritual counselors say the president's faith has helped shape his first term in ways that haven't been appreciated by voters or the news media.
And they say the presidency is bringing Obama to a new place in his faith - building on a system of belief and practice that helped bring him to the White House in the first place.
Talking like Billy Graham
These days, when the president talks about his faith, he sounds like a born-again Christian.
Addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington this year, Obama recalled meeting the nation's most iconic evangelical Christian, Billy Graham, and described his struggle to find the right words as he prayed aloud with the aging evangelist.
"Like that verse in Romans, the Holy Spirit interceded when I didn't know quite what to say," Obama told the gathering, invoking the New Testament.
It was hardly the only part of the speech where Obama was speaking "Christianese" - employing a lexicon familiar to evangelical Christians, who put a premium on quoting Scripture and communing directly with the Holy Spirit.
At the same breakfast, Obama spoke of spending time every morning in "Scripture and devotion" and dropped the names of "friends like Joel Hunter or T.D. Jakes," both well-known pastors of evangelical megachurches.
"He was talking like Billy Graham" at the breakfast, says Mansfield, who also wrote an admiring spiritual biography of former President George W. Bush.
"While I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings," Obama said in his acceptance speech, "knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'"
Such pious talk marks a departure from how the president discussed his faith life before his White House years.
Back then, Obama cited his religion more as a basis for social action than for spiritual sustenance. He would temper declarations of belief with affirmations of doubt.
Asked in a 2004 interview whether he prayed often, Obama, then a candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois, responded: "Uh, yeah, I guess I do."
In a 2007 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Obama voiced skepticism about Scripture.
"There are aspects of the Christian tradition that I'm comfortable with and aspects that I'm not," he said. "There are passages of the Bible that make perfect sense to me and others that I go 'Ya know, I'm not sure about that.'"
These days, Obama forgoes such equivocations in favor of a full-throated Christianity.
To Mansfield, the evolution of Obama's comments on religion bespeak a born-again experience, prompted largely by the president's break with Wright and his arrival into a circle of spiritual counselors that includes many evangelicals.
The White House declined requests to speak to Obama.
But Hunter, the president's closest spiritual counselor, says Obama has technically been a born-again Christian for more than 25 years, since accepting Jesus at Wright's Chicago church in the 1980s.
But it's in the last four years that the president has become more evangelical in his habits.
He now begins each morning reading Christian devotionals on his Blackberry.
And then there's the circle of pastors Obama has begun praying with before big events like the first presidential debate.
A circle of evangelicals
After landing in Washington following his 2008 election, Obama shopped around for a new church. But he wound up making his spiritual home instead among a circle of far-flung pastors that includes Hunter, Jakes and Caldwell, the minister from Texas.
Conference calls with the group started while Obama was still a presidential candidate, including on the night of his 2008 victory. The president-elect spoke by phone with Hunter and other Christian ministers, rejoicing in victory but also grieving the death of his grandmother, who helped raise him, just a few days earlier.
The migration from Wright - who almost brought down Obama's campaign with videos that showed him sermonizing about "God damn America" and "the U.S. of KKK A" - to this new group, says Mansfield, has been underappreciated.
"[Obama] went into the Oval Office ... questioning the only pastor he'd ever had," Mansfield says. "Wright left him humiliated."
"And there were deeper questions about the theology that [Obama] had received," Mansfield continues. "Some part of Wright's religious orientation had failed."
Where Wright is a liberal mainline Protestant, emphasizing liberation and social action, Obama's new circle of pastors includes theologically conservative evangelicals like Hunter and Jakes, who stress God's grace and personal transformation.
Mansfield notes that the chaplain who has presided for the last few years at Camp David, where Obama spends many Sundays, is also an evangelical.
Some of Obama's spiritual counselors credit Joshua DuBois, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, with leading Obama to a more evangelical-flavored Christianity. Caldwell calls him the president's personal pastor.
A former associate pastor at a Pentecostal church in Boston, DuBois is the one responsible for sending Obama Scriptures and scriptural meditations five days a week; Hunter does it on the other two days.
DuBois convenes a daily 8:15 a.m. conference call with pastors to pray for the country and the president, who is not on the call. (Lately, those calls have also included prayers for Mitt Romney.)
And it's DuBois who organized the president's circle of spiritual advisers. After graduate school at Princeton, DuBois talked his way onto Obama's staff at the U.S. Senate, repeatedly driving to Washington to make his case after job applications were rejected.
When Obama launched his presidential campaign a few years later, DuBois was plucked as its faith outreach director.
The 30-year-old White House aide plays down his influence on his boss.
"He has always been on a Christian journey," DuBois says of Obama, "and the challenges of the office, of being leader of the free world, provides a deepening and strengthening of faith, and that's what you see with the president."
"I remember working with him around the Scripture he would use at the memorial service for the miners in West Virginia," DuBois says, referring to the 2010 tragedy that left 29 dead. "These are obviously moments when one's faith is strengthened."
The unparalleled trials of the Oval Office have been known to deepen the religiosity of presidents ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan.
Hunter says the same thing has happened to this president: "His faith has been growing as the challenges of the presidency have become more naturally the main part of his own everyday life."
One of Hunter's first Oval Office encounters with Obama came shortly after the president took office, at a time when the economy was shedding 750,000 jobs a month.
"He acknowledged at that meeting what many may know but few remember: that by the time issues get to the president, there are no simple or clear answers or they would have been solved by others," Hunter says. "So we prayed."
A few months later, Hunter was in the Oval Office again, noticing that "the unremitting heaviness of the office was setting in."
"I saw something that has been consistent ever since: He cannot just pray for himself and his family," Hunter says by e-mail. "At least I have never seen it. His faith, his heart, always includes those who are being left out through no fault of their own."
Despite the changes they've seen in Obama, both Hunter and DuBois are uncomfortable with the word "transformation" when it comes to Obama's White House faith life.
"The president doesn't deal in labels," says DuBois. "He knows God's grace is sufficient for him and beyond that doesn't get into labels, evangelical or mainline. He's a proud Christian."
Loving God by loving your neighbor
When the Rev. Sharon Watkins and a group of fellow Protestant ministers sat down with Obama at the White House a couple years into the president's term, she knew the pastors would get wonky about religion.
"You get a bunch of ministers in the room and we're all church geeks - it's theological," says Watkins, who along with the other pastors had come to talk about poverty. "But the president got every biblical allusion and reference. ... He's just a person who is biblically and theologically literate."
If Obama's personal theology has grown more conservative, he is inclined to apply it toward liberal political ends.
"I'd be remiss if my values were limited to personal moments of prayer or private conversations with pastors or friends," Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast in February. "So instead, I must try - imperfectly, but I must try - to make sure those values motivate me as one leader of this great nation."
In signing laws that have increased Wall Street regulations and stopped health insurance companies from rejecting patients with preexisting conditions, Obama said at the breakfast, he wanted to "make the economy stronger for everybody."
"But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years," he continued. "And I believe in God's command to 'love thy neighbor as thyself.'"
Obama went on to frame decisions as disparate as ending tax breaks for the wealthy and defending foreign aid as examples of biblical principles in action, quoting Jesus' teaching that "for unto whom much is given, much shall be required" and invoking the "biblical call to care for the least of these."
That last biblical reference also loomed large in another 2011 White House meeting between Obama and a group of religious leaders. They'd come to urge the president to protect programs for the poor amid his fight with Congress over raising the nation's debt ceiling.
The Rev. Jim Wallis, a progressive activist, recalls the meeting:
In pressing Obama to take cuts to those programs off the table, one Roman Catholic bishop told the president that "the text that we are obliged to obey does not say 'as you have done to the middle class you have done to me.'"
"It says as you've done to the least of these, you have done to me," the bishop said. "I know that text," Obama responded. The passage is from the Matthew 25 in the New Testament.
"So there was this very rigorous conversation," Wallis says, "and we pressed him on applying Matthew 25 to this decision about protecting those who were the least of these."
Ultimately, the programs that the religious leaders were lobbying for were protected in the debt ceiling deal, though it's unclear how big a role the religious leaders played.
For liberal Christians, such victories embody the justice of the social gospel, the idea that believers should do God's work - even aid the Second Coming - by improving society.
"I do notice that sometimes, like on health care, when [Obama] says it's the right thing to do, it's him saying you love God by loving your neighbor," says Watkins, who leads a mainline denomination called Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). "He's doing the best he can to be guided by God so he can be a faithful follower of Christ."
Skeptics might write off Obama's Bible talk as sanctimonious window dressing, aimed at no higher purpose than connecting with churchgoers in the purple and red states. But translating the Good Book into progressive politics has always been a mainstay of Obama's political biography.
'An awesome God in the blue states'
When Obama landed on Chicago's South Side in 1985 as an idealistic 23-year-old, eager to start work as a community organizer, he was already a political liberal.
He was also a man without a religion, the son of a spiritual-but-not-religious mother whom he would later describe as "a lonely witness for secular humanism" and an estranged African father who was born a Muslim but died an atheist.
Obama's work in Chicago, built around causes like tenants' rights and job training for laid-off workers, was steeped in religion.
His salary was paid by a coalition of churches. And the job took him into many black churches, among the most influential institutions in the neighborhood he was organizing, including Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ.
After a lifelong struggle to fit in, set in motion by his mixed-race parents, Trinity felt like home.
"I came to realize that without a vessel for beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith," he wrote later, "I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart."
The changes that Wright's church wrought weren't just personal. Baptism and active membership there equipped Obama with an ability to connect with churchgoers he was trying to organize - and, years later, with religious voters he was trying to win over - in a deeper way.
Wright, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, gave Obama a moral framework for his liberal politics. The pastor espoused a black liberation theology that equates Jesus' life and death with the plight of those who Wright saw as disenfranchised, from African-Americans to Palestinians.
"Wright is the religious version of almost everything Obama already believed without religion," says Mansfield, who spent time at Trinity for his book. "It's a support of oppressed people anywhere in the world."
When Obama emerged on the national stage, his comfortable religiosity and sensitivity to the concerns of churchgoing Americans helped distinguish him as a Democrat.
"We worship an awesome God in the blue states," he declared to huge applause in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, catching the attention of young Christians like Joshua DuBois.
But at that same convention, Obama's party nominated John Kerry, a candidate who eschewed God talk and who lost his own Catholic demographic on Election Day.
Four years later, Obama hired religious outreach staffers like DuBois for his presidential campaign and made a point of meeting with Christian Right leaders who'd never before heard from a Democratic presidential nominee.
Obama went on to win in places like Indiana and North Carolina, evangelical-heavy states that a Democratic presidential nominee hadn't taken in decades.
If the Rev. Wright had almost brought down his presidential campaign, the controversial minister had also long ago laid the groundwork for Obama to connect with the churchgoing voters who had turned their backs on Kerry.
The politics of confusion
As president, the line between Obama's personal convictions and his political prowess on religious matters can sometimes be hard to discern.
Obama invited the conservative evangelical megapastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his 2009 inauguration, ruffling liberal feathers. He introduced an annual Easter prayer breakfast as a new White House tradition. He gives shout-outs to young evangelical leaders in major speeches.
All can be seen as genuine reflections of Obama's faith and his appreciation for the role of religious leaders in public life. And in a nation where more people believe in angels than in evolution - a fact that the president himself has publicly noted - all promise political benefits.
The same could be said for Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, and for presidents as diverse as Jimmy Carter and Reagan: All had deep spiritual streaks that enabled the political art of courting religious Americans, especially evangelicals.
The irony, in Obama's case, is that despite his orthodox utterances - there's "something about the resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective," he said at this year's Easter breakfast - polls continue to show widespread confusion about his faith.
Only half the country can correctly identify Obama as Christian, according to one recent Pew poll, while 17% falsely believe he is a Muslim.
"He's a Christian and he professes his Christian faith - I don't know what else this man has to do to get that into folks' ears," says Caldwell, who was also close to George W. Bush.
But Obama's public piety has helped him bond with young evangelical leaders, who are less tied to the GOP than their parents' generation.
"I was struck by the specificity of what he described in terms of theology and what it means to him," says Gabe Lyons, one such leader, describing a White House Easter breakfast he attended. "His message is very specific and very orthodox."
Where exactly that new orthodoxy comes from - the pressures of the White House, a new circle of religious advisers or, to a certain degree, from political calculation - may become clearer after Obama's presidency, if he opens up about such matters.
Until then, the president is likely to keep speaking "Christianese" - and resisting Christian labels. Dan Gilgoff - CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor
