The Faith of Barack Obama

Thomas Nelson Publishers very kindly gave me the opportunity to review one of their recently published books. I had always wanted to review something on my blog but had no idea how to find such an opportunity. Yes, I know that you can review just about anything on your own, and I have, but to actually be an official reviewer – now that is special.

So my big opportunity comes along, and what is the topic? Politics! American Politics! Now if you have not caught on from earlier posts, I am not to fond of American politics or politicians, but this is my big opportunity to become a real journalist, so here goes:

The Faith of Barack Obama – by Stephen Mansfield

Well, with a title like that you can pretty much figure out which way the bias is going to run. Except that any good author is going to pick a title that captures the attention of the target audience. And if you are going to write about politics your target audience is going to be those with an opposing point of view. So we must assume that the book comes from a secular liberal point of view. Then again maybe it is the right disguised as the left disguised as the right. I quickly thought through all the permutations and decided I would just have to read the book and find out.

Having now finished the book I am still not sure what the author’s bias was, or even his point of view. If his intent was to convince anyone to vote for or against Barack Obama, then he failed. But, if his goal was only to inform, then he succeeded splendidly. For most of the book I felt like I was reading Wikipedia or even the Encyclopedia Britannica. He presented arguments from both sides in a quite convincing way.

Stephen Mansfield stuffed the book with history and biography leaving very little room for personal opinion. I can honestly see people giving this to a friend and saying, “Here is why Obama is so great! He will heal the nation and bring it back together after a cold-civil-war. A war of ideas fought neighbor against neighbor instead of state against state. Like a modern day Lincoln, he will reunite the house so that it does not fall.” I can also see another group reading the same book and saying, “This is the problem with Obama. He is the perfect Anti-Christ, the obama-nation of desolation, uniting the world under a single religion combining the good from all the world religions and leaving out all of the unkind things that people like Jesus said.” In a single book, Mansfield covers all sides quite thoroughly and to the satisfaction of both sides. He even gives a quick look into the background of Clinton, Bush, and McCain.

I really had not taken the time to learn much about McCain or Obama, so this book really helped me get a sense of who these guys are. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a quick overview of the candidate’s, especially Obama’s, life history and background. This book talks as much about what shaped their total philosophy of life as it does about any particular religious issue. Overall, I would say that it is a well written, and surprisingly well balanced presentation of the facts with a very high meat to fluff ratio.