I found this video today, posted on the 4marks.com website.
It features a discussion about religion that took place in a 2004 debate between Barack Obama and Alan Keyes, during the U.S. Senate race in Illinois between the two African-American Christians.
Posting the video is timely, because of the insight it provides about how Obama anchors his own faith in the encounters he had as a young community organizer with Christians who helped implement the social programs Obama was promoting.
Obama’s philosophy — that the content of a religion matters little as long as its adherents support the same social and political agendas as does Obama — is likely to be the animating principle of the revamped White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that the president announced at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast.
Keyes, who is Catholic, was not persuaded in 2004 that Obama’s approach reflects an authentic Christian faith.
Said Keyes, “When it really comes down to it, though Senator Obama professes faith when it’s convenient to get votes, at the hard points where that faith must be followed and explained to folks and stood up for and witnessed to, as folks who were martyrs in the early Church said, he then pleads ‘separation of church and state’ — something found nowhere in the Constitution and certainly found nowhere in the Scriptures as such.”