Obama talks openly about his faith

Photo: FaithWorld

Back when Barack Obama was just an Illinois senator, back in the long long ago, Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani, one of the best religion writers around, interviewed the ambitious politician and joint poignant responses about just what his faith meant to him. That would be Christianity, not Islam, though his answer to “Who’s Jesus to you?” is weak.

“Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher,” Obama said. “And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.”

Obama also speaks positively about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, though only briefly.

Falsani’s interview, which was for a series of articles about the private faith of public people and later included in a book adapted from the series called “The God Factor,” occurred four and a half years ago, but there is obviously more interest now in what President-elect Obama told her than in, say, what Melissa Etheridge did. So Falsani sent a transcript of the entire interview to Beliefnet. It’s all after the jump: