From his frequent God talk on the campaign trail to his latest proposal to expand aid to faith-based programmes, Democrat Barack Obama is serious and aggressive when it comes to courting faith voters.
The Illinois senator not only challenges the long-held tacit alliance between evangelicals and the Republican Party, but is doing so with some success, according to a well-known emergent leader.
"I think there's a very, very sizable percentage – I think between a third and half – of evangelicals, especially younger [evangelicals], who are very open to somebody with a new vision," said Brian McLaren, a former pastor and now informal adviser to the Obama campaign, according to CNN.
McLaren believes a significant number of evangelical voters are breaking away from the Republican Party to rally behind Obama, who speaks about a faith that cares for the poor and seeks to protect the environment.
"We've watched the evangelical community be led – be misled – by the Republican Party to support things they really shouldn't have supported," McLaren said, giving as example the group’s “blind support” for the Iraq war, which he claims was “launched on either mistaken or false pretenses”.
The evangelicals who are attracted to Obama are part of a new generation of faith voters where the issues of Darfur, global warming, poverty, and torture are considered as important, or at least nearly as important, as the traditional key issues of abortion and gay “marriage” when choosing the next president.
As a reminder of his commitment to faith-driven solutions to social problems, Obama announced Tuesday his plans to expand President Bush’s faith-based programmes if elected to the White House.
Obama, a former community organiser in Chicago, said his programme would better reach smaller congregations, be a “critical part of my administration”, and proposed a $500 million per year programme to provide summer learning to one million poor children.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the faith-based initiative is important to Bush, according to Bloomberg news, and if Obama supports the idea, “that’s something we’d all be very happy about”.
