When asked what he believed, he started by saying that he was a Christian. But there was more to it than that. He went on to explain that he was born in Hawaii, where there are considerable Eastern influences. He attended a Catholic school while a child in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. His Kenyan father and grandfather were agnostic and Muslim respectively. His grandmother was originally Methodist, and his grandfather a Baptist, at a time when the Methodists felt superior to the Baptists, but the two had joined a Universalist church by the time he was born.
Having been exposed to all these influences and more, his personal belief is that there is a higher power, that we are all connected as a people, and that there are values that transcend race or culture.
But for me, the most important thing that he said was that for him, ‘sin’ meant being out of alignment with his values.
I was raised in a Conservative Jewish family in the predominantly Christian suburbs of New York City, but set out on my own spiritual path. My sister became more deeply involved with Judaism, while I, after a wide-ranging exploration of many of the paths that Obama alluded to, ended up on the philosophical outskirts of the scattered and largely invisible Pagan community.
What I see in our newly elected president is a person who not only follows Jesus’ admonition to love your neighbor, but who can also put himself in the place of that neighbor, regardless of how different he or she might be from himself. One effect of being able to do this is a subtle modification to the Golden Rule. For whereas treating others as you would treat yourself is useful advice for those on the monocultural side of the Experiential Divide, treating them as they would like to be treated makes far more sense to those who realize that the other person may not be quite the same as you.
We have four years to engage all of the people in the US in an extremely important conversation. Four years to introduce everyone on the monocultural side of the divide to people who are different from them in all of the wonderful ways that cause what people once called a melting pot to be more of a polycultural, polylinguistic and polyracial stew.
So take a coin and flip it in the air. As it spins, and the disk traces out a sphere, the ideas wrapped up in the slogans “In God We Trust” and “E Pluribus Unum” inform one another, creating the promise of whatever future we choose. Will it land head, tails, or perfectly balanced? Beyond that, are the two paths that you have decided to choose between the only ones? Before you toss that coin, have another look around.
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