Barack Obama: Putting faith out frontHow the Illinois senator came to embrace religion in his life.By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0716/p01s01-uspo.htmlObama and his advisers have said that his faith has motivated legislation meant to benefit the poor, the uninsured, and minorities. In the Illinois state Senate, Father Pfleger recalls, Obama sponsored measures to clamp down on high-interest "payday loans" in poor neighborhoods and to require Illinois police agencies to record the race of motorists they stop as part of a state effort to monitor racial profiling. He also pressed for a bill requiring police to videotape interrogations of murder suspects, as a safeguard against coerced confessions.
At a speech last month at the annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference in Virginia, he offered his most detailed list to date of programs he said should spring from "our faith, the Word, and His will." They range from a new service corps for disadvantaged youths and a program to have nurses teach low-income mothers good parenting to more jobs programs for ex-convicts and more venture capital for minority-owned businesses.
Elsewhere, he has preached a version of his church's critique of black "middleclassness." He told a crowd in Selma, Ala., in March that his generation of blacks should strive for more than just "some of that Oprah money."
"Materialism alone will not fulfill the possibilities of your existence," he said. "You have to fill it with the golden rule. You've got to fill it with thinking about others."
Last year, he and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, sponsored a successful bill to let people in bankruptcy continue to donate money to their places of worship.