Newsweek had their “Easter issue” out on Monday with a cover story by editor John Meacham titled, “The End of Christian America.” Regulars of this blog will enjoy reading the piece. It was special fun for me as the focus of much of the article was Meacham’s interview with my own boss, who then followed up the Newsweek piece with a blog post of his own, then radio. It has been a great week for conversation about such things.

Here is an excerpt from the opening:

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly…

Reinhold Niebuhr

This week NPR’s Morning Edition has run back-to-back interviews with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham discussing the memoirs of Barack Obama and John McCain. The idea is to get beyond sound bites and offer an analysis of the major people and events that have shaped the two men, at least according to their own published work.

The fascinating conclusion is that this country’s two major-party presidential candidates have both been strongly influenced by the same theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.

My initial question is about the way it seems that Niebuhr was seized upon as a hidden, explanatory link between the characters of Obama and McCain. Is this just another example of an almost obsessive fascination with the interplay of politics and religion during this election cycle? Or is something else going on here?

In one sense, there’s nothing surprising about finding references to Reinhold Niebuhr in the writings of both candidates. Niebuhr is generally regarded as one…