It is never easy to discern a person's core spiritual beliefs. Even Barack Obama, who has written two acclaimed memoirs and speaks comfortably about his faith, remains opaque on the subject. Still, religious questions and controversies have drawn fierce attention throughout Obama's presidential campaign. There was, of course, the fallout from his relationship with his ex-pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and the persistent false rumors that Obama is a Muslim. Lately, pundits and politicos have been analyzing his chances of tapping into the evangelical Christian vote. But it seemed to us that many of these issues served to obscure his religious convictions, not illuminate them. So we asked Lisa Miller, our religion editor, to pur-remains overtly a doubter, a skeptic, an intellectual, a rationalist," she says. Yet as Editor Jon Meacham points out in an accompanying essay, Obama fits squarely into a tradition of American politicians who've wrestled with doubt and faith, among them his hero Abraham Lincoln. As Jon writes, "Reason and experience make it impossible for many believers to accept that any religious creed can alone make sense of the unfolding tragedy of history."
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