Obama lays claim to religion’s centrality in the public arena, rejecting all clear distinctions between the public and the private spheres. Do you believe that this position could be described as “post-secular”? Is this in line with Americans’ religious feelings?

Obama as a post-secular American politician? In spite of our strict constitutional separation between church and state, the prohibition against state establishment of religion, religion is and always has occupied a central place in the public sphere, in part because of the very competition and freedom for religious critique that this separation has made possible. More to the point it has never been possible for an American Presidential candidate to be truly secular. Americans believe in God; they believe in heaven and hell, (unlike the Italians, who only believe in hell); they have personal experience of Jesus. More than seventy percent of my countrymen are absolutely certain that God exists and about the same percentage believe that it is essential for a Presidential candidate to likewise believe. So you can see that an atheist cannot get elected President of the United States. At least you have to make the rite moves. Obama is not and cannot be post-secular because we’ve never had a secular electorate.

Is his position perhaps not more authentically religious and able to attract consensus compared to Hilary Clinton’s laicity, albeit favourable to religion?

Unlike Hillary Clinton and like Jimmy Carter, Obama is the real deal and very much like the electorate. Obama carries God in his heart; it is not just an arrow in his quiver of political instruments. The parallels and the differences with President Bush (the second one) are striking. Obama and Bush both found themselves through Jesus. For Bush, it was alcoholism and the prospect of marital and parental failure these portended, that brought him to Jesus who showed him the way. The difference is that Obama found Jesus while working with and for the poor in Chicago’s black South Side. "I learned that my sins could be redeemed,” Obama told the congregation at the United Church of Christ last year, explaining his own salvation experience. “I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life…. It came about as a choice, and … kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s Spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works."

What is the significant difference between Bush and Obama as far as the subject of faith in God is concerned?

The difference between Bush and Obama points to a longstanding division on just how religion has been constituted in America. On the one hand, the tradition that Bush follows is that sin is located in the individual soul, in our weakness, following St. Paul, in our personal rebellion against God. It is this tradition that has dominated the discourse of evangelical and fundamentalist communities. It is this tradition that is most consonant with a celebration of the market with its ethic of individual effort and individual reward. On the other hand, there is the “social gospel” tradition which says that the primary sources of sin are located in the society, in the way it robs individuals of dignity, of the possibility of making righteous choices. Obama comes from this latter tradition. For Obama, being a Christian means fighting for social justice. It is the same tradition that fired the black Baptists who defied the white racists of the South and destroyed segregation. It is, indeed, the same tradition that sent Union soldiers into battle against the southern slave states and ended slavery.

What effect will claiming faith’s centrality in politics, in particular that of the Christian faith, have on other denominations, in particular on the Muslim faith? Will this attitude coexist peacefully with the protection of other denominations?

With a Muslim father and a country which has become increasingly suspicious of Muslims after 911, Obama has to tread carefully in order to get elected. The New Yorker cover showing him in Arab garb, poking fun at the unspeakable undercurrent of fear in our country, sparked a firestorm of controversy. But the basic structure of opinion in America among the followers of different religious faith is one of ecumenicism, of tolerance, of belief that all religions lead to the same God. People are tolerant of other religious traditions. They are less tolerant of those who do not believe. Among the devout, let’s say a Catholic, it is easier to talk to a Protestant, Muslim or a Jew, than it is to talk to somebody who does not believe. What Obama will do, and sincerely, is play on America’s religious cosmopolitanism as a model to think ethically about how we can live together in the world. America is a country with a miserable record in terms of how we treat our poorest citizens. The part of which we can be proud is the ways in which we have absorbed wave after wave of immigration from non-Protestant religious traditions and now non-Christian traditions, in which we all live together with relatively minor frictions. Seeing mobs attack the Roma communities in Italy, I increasingly understand how significant that achievement really is.

Will such a religious president be capable of making secular choices in favour of abortions, gay rights, new families in spite of the fact that the United States is an ethically pluralistic country?

I think what Obama is doing and has done on abortion is recognize that it does not parse easily as a question of citizenship rights, that it is just a matter of a woman having the right to control what happens in her body. He understands it is also a deep moral issue grounded in the definition of the human, of what is a life, of when life begins. Although he later condemned Congress’ passage of a ban on partial-birth abortions, when he had previously served in the Illinois legislature, he refused to vote against those who would ban partial-birth abortions, casting a vote of “present” as opposed to a “no.” (Partial birth abortion is a political term that refers to a late term abortion in which a viable fetus is partially extracted from the mother’s stomach and then killed, typically in the second or early third trimester. President Clinton vetoed a bill banning them during his presidency and President Bush finally passed the ban into law in 2003, whose constitutionality was upheld in 2007 by the Supreme Court by just one vote. Thirty six states have bans on partial birth abortions.) I think he is going to work the divide between the personal, ethical-religious side and the institutional, citizenship rights side, in order to try to find a common ground. And most important, as I pointed out above, he is going to work the social gospel side of this, looking at the social conditions that lead to unwanted pregnancies. For a lot of young girls, it is powerlessness vis-à-vis boys that makes them vulnerable to sex without protection; it is the absence of job prospects that makes having a baby something cool to do.

In Obama’s speeches, religion is often a useful rhetorical weapon for emotionally involving the public and creating consensus. Do you believe this is an inappropriate weapon, or does the fact that the speeches made by the candidate for the presidency seem like sermons represent a new means of communication that is more engaging and warmer than Clinton-style intellectualism?

There is no question that religious talk, religious idiom, the insertion of faith, and of moral language is a way to connect with ordinary American people. All Hillary’s technocratic talk about policies doesn’t reach a lot of voters. What reached them was that she endured and maintained her dignity vis a vis a philandering husband, continued to be a good mother. A lot of women I know love her and I mean that literally. They feel her pain, the sexism to which she was subjected by the media. She is one of them. Americans relate to a candidate’s existential condition as much, if not more than, their policy positions. Obama is a guy whose father abandoned him, who nevertheless made it up on his own, who made himself into a successful American, head of the Harvard Law Review, a happily married guy who obviously loves his wife and his children, who reminds us that, given the opportunities, we can make of ourselves something, that we can love and work and be satisfied in life. He represents America’s greatness and we feel it. Religious language in America is not tied to doctrine, to dogma, to theology, but to spirituality, to one’s personal relation to God, to forces beyond us, to a recognition of the limits of our sovereignty as self-contained, autonomous selves who make rational choices like supermen. Religious talk in America is powerful because it taps and produces humility. That’s what Obama has going for him.

In one of his most famous essays, linguist George Lakoff wrote using the image of the “nourishing mother” for the Left and that of an "authoritarian father" for the Right. Where do you think Obama stands within this framework?

I don’t know about this momma-papa divide. Obama does fuse the promise to take care and the demand that we take responsibility. Obama was raised by women. The Reverend Wright was a kind of father-substitute, the man who shepherded him into adulthood, which is why it was so painful to have to repudiate him. Obama had the courage to speak to the black community and call its men to account this last Father’s Day, to say that too many men have gone missing, abandoning their children, just as he was abandoned. That took guts. Jessie Jackson was outraged. Not suspecting that his remarks were picked up by the microphone he said: "See, Barack [has] been talking down to black people . . . I wanna cut his nuts out." Jackson said. Obama has publicly declared that victimhood is not a perpetual possession, that it is time to care and demand personal responsibility in tandem. It is a call to all fathers, not just black ones, to take care. If that’s maternal-paternal, I guess it works.

I think that Obama’s run for Presidency has the potential to transform American politics. Religion is not going to go away. What Obama has the chance of doing is something that President Jimmy Carter, a Baptist, sought to do, to place God back on the side of social justice. This is going to be tough and slow. But there are already signs of movement this way. As of June, 2008, Obama was ahead of McCain among religious voters, by which I mean those who say they are affiliated with other denomination or another. The interesting thing to watch are the evangelical voters. You’ve got to remember that four out of every ten Bush voters last time were evangelicals. If McCain can’t bring them out again, or if he can’t make their loss up with Catholic voters, I don’t think he can win. Indeed, it is likely to be Catholic voters who will decide our future in this country, and hence the world’s future. About a quarter of the evangelicals support Obama now. What is important are the young evangelical voters who represent the future. They are moving much more rapidly than their parents either into the Obama camp or into the undecided camp. This is extraordinary because McCain is opposed to abortion and Obama is not. That was their big issue in the past. There is still a huge partisan division between those for whom religion is a central pillar in their lives and those for whom it is not. But I think that Obama has a chance of muddying the waters. And that would be a good thing.