“As Americans wake up, “they will be making their acquaintance with a new country,” the statement said after the November 4 election in which Obama defeated Republican Party candidate John McCain. The statement continued, “Though many may not know what kind of president Barack Obama will be, we do know that just by attaining the presidency, he has breathed fresh life into the dream delivered by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. forty years ago.”
The church statement said that Obama’s race “matters deeply to the millions of pioneers who have bled and died, and given their all for such a time as this. And it matters to all people — Americans and foreigners — who are astonished to see this nation take such a profound symbolic step on the path to realizing that an African American man could preside over the free world.”
In a letter addressed to the president-elect, Michael Kinnamon, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, the nation’s largest ecumenical agency, told Obama the NCC was urging Americans “to come together to uphold you with our hands, our hearts and our prayers.”
Still, the letter noted that only “rarely in our history has a president-elect faced immediate challenges of such fierce magnitude”. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, one of the NCC’s 35 member denominations.
Early analysis of religious trends in the election, which Obama won by 52 percent to McCain’s 46 percent of the popular vote, indicates that among nearly all religious groups, including Protestants, Catholics, Jews and the religiously unaffiliated, Obama equaled or surpassed the support Democratic Party candidate John Kerry received in his race against President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
Asked by Ecumenical News International, during a November 5 post-election news conference, to describe the overarching trends of the 2008 election, analysts of the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said that Obama’s gains over Kerry were still not enough to classify the election as an historic realignment.
“If the trends had a single headline, it would be ‘Obama gains with all religious groups but the ‘God Gap’ continues’,” Luis Lugo, Pew Forum director, told ENI. Exit polls, which the Pew analysts were careful to say were not official election results, showed Obama made the most substantial gains among Roman Catholics (seven percent) and those who were religiously unaffiliated (eight percent) but these two groups tend to vote Democratic anyway. Catholics favored Obama over McCain by 54 percent to 45 percent, while the unaffiliated favored Obama to McCain by 75 percent to 23 percent.
Obama, who had reached out during his campaign to white Protestants, particularly white evangelicals, did better among white Protestants than Kerry had done previously, and showed a five percent gain, though white Protestants still favored McCain over Obama by 54 percent to 45 percent.
Pew Senior Fellow John Green said the result could be interpreted as either
a disappointment or a modest success. While Obama received 26 percent of white evangelical support over McCain’s 73 percent, it was still five percent higher than the percentage Kerry received in 2004.
