This is the first book to focus on the significance of religion during President Obama's years in the White House. Addressing issues ranging from identity politics, immigration, income inequality, Islamophobia and international affairs, Religion in the Age of Obama explores the religious and moral underpinnings of the Obama presidency and subsequent debates regarding his tenure in the White House. It provides an analysis of Obama's beliefs and their relationship to his vision of public life, as well as the way in which the general ethos of religion and non-religion has shifted over the past decade in the United States under his presidency. Topics include how Obama has employed religious rhetoric in response to both international and domestic events, his attempt to inhabit a kind of Blackness that comforts and reassures rather than challenges White America, the limits of Christian hospitality within U.S. immigration policy and the racialization of Islam in the U.S. national imagination. Religion in the Age of Obama shows that the years of the Obama presidency served as a watershed moment of significant reorganization of the role of religion in national public life. It is a timely contribution to debates on religion, race and public life in the United States.

Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: Faith in Public 1. Religion (and Race) Problems on the Way to the White House: An Analysis of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's 'Faith' Speeches, Max Mueller (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA) 2. Political Spirituality, or The Oprahfication of Obama, Kathryn Lofton (Yale University, USA) 3. A Muslim in the White House? Race, Islam, and the Presidency of Barack Obama, Sylvester A. Johnson (Virginia Tech, USA) 4. Towards a 'Culture of Mercy': Augustine, Pope Francis, and the Transformation of Moral Imagination, Melanie Webb (Villanova University, USA) Part Two: The Politics of Moral Vision 5. The Welfare of Faith, Alison Collis Greene (Mississippi State University, USA) 6. The Mystification of Capitalism and the Mis-direction of White Male Anger, Rebecca Todd Peters (Elon University, USA) 7. Costs of Corporate Conscience: How Women, Queers, and People of Color Are Paying for Hobby Lobby's Sincerely-Held Beliefs, Megan Goodwin (Northeastern University, USA) 8. Black Prophetic Discourse and Just War Theory in the Age of Obama, Juan Floyd-Thomas (Vanderbilt University, USA) Part Three: On Race/ing Belief 9. When White is the 'New Black': Religious Populism in the Age of Obama, Keri Day (Princeton Theological Seminary, USA) 10. In the Wake of Obama's Hope: Thoughts on Black Lives Matter, Moralism, and Re-Imagining Race Struggle, Anthony B. Pinn (Rice University, USA) 11. Deporter-in-Chief: Why Reject Christianity Hospitality?, Miguel A. De La Torre (Iliff School of Theology, USA) 12. 'Now.Next': Confronting the Past and Shaping the Future, Sharon Welch (Institute for Humanist Studies, USA) Bibliography Index