Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, page 206:

The Christians with whom I worked [as a community organizer] recognized themselves in me; they saw that I knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was, but also alone in the same ways that she was ultimately alone. There are worse things than such freedom.

This is less of a criticism than an observation, but many religious believers probably couldn’t imagine anything worse than not having their relationship with God. They don’t see their relationship with their Creator, by whatever name they call the divine, as something they could be “free” from, and in fact a fairly common definition of Hell is in fact “complete separation from God.”

I realize this is a debate more appropriate for theologians than campaign correspondents. But this passage seems to be a little something to think about as Obama continues his efforts to win over evangelical voters.

UPDATE: Several readers ask if Obama is referring to freedom from a particular religious community instead of freedom from a relationship with the divine or religious belief itself. He spends the preceding three pages talking about his mother’s views on religion.

I think it is accurate to describe her as an atheist, although he never quite explicitly says so. “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.” (p. 203) He says that “in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites… Religion was an offspring of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways – and not necessarily the best way – that man attempted to know the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.” (p. 204)

Yet Obama also concludes that “for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known,” praising her “kindness, charity, and love.” (p. 205) While referring to the values she taught, her desire to share a “gaze at a particularly spectacular moon” with her son, her willingness to play with children, etc., Obama never describes her as referring to a higher power, Creator, deity, the divine, etc.

That’s why I conclude that the “free as my mother was” refers to having no relationship with God.