WITHOUT A PASTOR OF HIS OWN, OBAMA TURNS TO FIVE

President Obama has been without a pastor or a home church ever since he cut his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in the heat of the presidential campaign. But he has quietly cultivated a handful of evangelical pastors for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics

All are men, two of them white and three black — including the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a graying lion of the civil rights movement. Two, the entrepreneurial dynamos Bishop T. D. Jakes and the Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, also served as occasional spiritual advisers to President George W. BushAnother, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leans left on some issues, like military intervention and poverty programs, but opposes abortion.
None of these pastors are affiliated with the religious right, though several are quite conservative theologically. One of them, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the pastor of a conservative megachurch in Florida, was branded a turncoat by some leaders of the Christian right when he began to speak out on the need to stop global warming.
But as a group they can hardly be characterized as part of the religious left either. Most, like Mr. Wallis, do not take traditionally liberal positions on abortion or homosexuality. What most say they share with the president is the conviction that faith is the foundation in the fight against economic inequality and social injustice.
“These are all centrist, social justice guys,” said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, a politically active pastor of Azusa Community Church in Boston, who knows all of them but is not part of the president’s prayer caucus. “Obama genuinely comes out of the social justice wing of the church. That’s real. The community organizing stuff is real.”
The pastors say Mr. Obama appears to rely on his faith for intellectual and spiritual succor.
“While he may not put ‘Honk if You Love Jesus’ bumper stickers on the back of his car, he is the kind of guy who practices what he preaches,” said Mr. Caldwell, the senior pastor of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston. “He has a desire to keep in touch with folk outside the Beltway, and to stay in touch with God. He seems to see those as necessary conditions for maintaining his internal compass.”
Bishop Jakes said he had been tapped for several prayer phone calls — the most recent being when Mr. Obama’s grandmother died in November, two days before the election. “You take turns praying,” said Bishop Jakes, who like the other ministers did not want to divulge details of the calls. “It’s really more about contacting God than each other.”
Mr. Hunter said of the phone calls: “The times I have prayed with him, he’s always initiated it.”
The Obama administration has reached out to hundreds of religious leaders across the country to mobilize support and to seek advice on policy. These five pastors, however, have been brought into a more intimate inner circle. Their names were gleaned from interviews with people who know the president and religious leaders who work in Washington. Their role could change if Mr. Obama joins a church in Washington, but that could take some time because of the logistical challenges in finding a church that can accommodate the kind of crowd the Obamas would attract.
The White House refused to comment for this article.
The pastor in the circle who has known Mr. Obama the longest is Mr. Wallis, president and chief executive of Sojourners, a liberal magazine and movement based in Washington. In contrast to the other four, his contact with the president has been focused more on policy than prayer. Mr. Wallis has recently joined conservatives in pressing the president’s office of faith-based initiatives to continue to allow government financing for religious social service groups that hire only employees of their own faith.
Mr. Wallis said he got to know Mr. Obama in the late 1990s when they participated in a traveling seminar that took bus trips to community programs across the country. Mr. Wallis said they “hit it off” because they were both Christians serious about their faith, fathers of young children the same age and believers in “transcending left and right” to find solutions to social problems.
“He and I were what we called back then ‘progressive Christians,’ as opposed to the dominant religious-right era we were in then,” Mr. Wallis said. “We didn’t think Jesus’ top priorities would be capital gains tax cuts and supporting the next war.”
Presidents through the ages have leaned on pastors for spiritual support, policy advice and political cover. The Rev. Billy Graham was a counselor to at least five (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush), and tapes from the Nixon White House reveal that their talks veered beyond religion to political and social topics that later proved regretful.
Some presidents, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, regularly attended a local church. George W. Bush never joined a local church, but courted ministers on the religious right, which gained him favor with a major constituency for most of his two terms.
Pinning down Mr. Obama’s theological leanings is not easy, the ministers said in interviews. They said he is well read in the Bible, but has not articulated views consistent with the racially inflected interpretation of his former pastor, Mr. Wright.
Mr. Moss, who once worked alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who only recently retired from his pulpit at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, said of the president, “I would simply say that he is a person of great faith, and I think that faith has sustained him.”
Mr. Moss’s son is the Rev. Otis Moss III, who succeeded Mr. Wright as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Mr. Obama’s former church. Mr. Wright and the president are no longer in contact, said several people who know both men.
Bishop Jakes said he sought out Mr. Obama in Chicago because of their common interest in Kenya and because he was impressed with the speech Mr. Obama delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Bishop Jakes is himself a nationally known preaching powerhouse who fills sports stadiums and draws 30,000 worshipers to his church in Dallas, the Potter’s House. He also produces movies, writes books and runs antipoverty programs in Dallas and Kenya, where Mr. Obama has ties through his Kenyan father.
Three of the ministers said their introduction to the president was through Joshua DuBois, who led religious outreach for the Obama presidential campaign and now heads the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Mr. DuBois, who declined to comment, is himself a Pentecostal pastor.
Mr. Hunter, who leads a church in Longwood, Fla., said he was approached by Mr. DuBois in 2007 — a few months after he left his new post as head of the Christian Coalition, the conservative advocacy group, because the board did not want to enlarge its agenda to include environmental issues like global warming.
He has since written a book, “A New Kind of Conservative: Cooperation Without Compromise,” and gave an invocation at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last year.
Bishop Jakes, Mr. Wallis and Mr. Hunter said they were political independents. Mr. Moss and Mr. Caldwell publicly endorsed Mr. Obama, and Mr. Caldwell donated money to his campaign.
On the morning of the inauguration, Bishop Jakes delivered the sermon at a private service at St. John’s Episcopal Church. He likened Mr. Obama to the boys in the Book of Daniel who are thrown into a fiery furnace that is seven times hotter than it should be — and survive. “God is with you in the furnace,” Bishop Jakes preached to Mr. Obama.

CHRISTIAN RIGHT CHALLENGES OBAMA'S JUSTICE PICKS ; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE OBAMA'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT POSITIONS

WASHINGTON — Christian conservatives are challenging President Barack Obama's picks for top Justice Department positions, charging that past clients like Playboy taint their resumes.
The criticism comes ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Thursday for David Ogden, Obama's pick for deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the Justice Department.
Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, was confirmed by the Senate on Monday and started work the next day. As he waits for confirmation of his top aides, many on the religious right are questioning the nominee's backgrounds, saying they have promoted far left, pro-abortion, pro-gay policies.
"Ogden has been an activist in the support of a right to pornography, a right of abortion and the rights of homosexuals," said Patrick Trueman, a former Justice Department official during the first Bush presidency who is now in private practice.
"It isn't so much that he's represented pornographers or that he's been a porn attorney, but it's his world view, and his world view reflects President Obama's world view," said Trueman, echoing criticism from conservative activist groups like the American Family Association and Focus on the Family.
While a private attorney, Ogden argued on behalf of Playboy and librarians fighting congressionally mandated Internet filtering software. His clients also include corporate giants such as an oil company and the pharmaceutical industry.
The challenge to Obama's Justice picks come as conservative evangelicals seek to limit the power of the new Democratic administration and maintain their own within the Republican Party.
Some Republicans believe a tight embrace of social conservative values turns off independents and moderates, but many Christian right leaders resist compromise and contend that, if anything, the GOP has strayed too far from its principles.
Besides Ogden, conservatives also have taken aim at two other Justice picks — Indiana University professor Dawn Johnsen for her association with an abortion rights group, and Thomas Perrelli, who represented the husband of Terry Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman at the center of a right-to-die case that energized evangelical groups across the country.
Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a past colleague of the three during the Clinton administration, said the conservatives' criticism of the trio is unusual and unwarranted.
"Usually, you may have a fight over who the attorney general is, but this is not par for the course, picking off next to the attorney general three of his top appointments," Greenberger said. "This is harassment and it is an attempt to reverse the election."
Accusations of political manipulation at the Justice Department are not new. Over the past two years, the Bush administration has been investigated and excoriated by Democrats for making firing and hiring decisions based on political considerations.
Tom Minnery, a vice president at Focus on the Family, charges that through the nominations, the new Democratic administration is not depoliticizing, but re-politicizing the Justice Department.
"They take our breath away the more we learn about these people," said Minnery. "This is left-wing politicization of the Justice Department. This is not a Justice Department that looks like America."

OBAMA TO NAME FAITH COUNCIL PANEL ; PRAY FOR THE COUNCIL AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

President Obama on Thursday will roll out the names of a long-anticipated "faith advisory council" of more than two dozen religious leaders who will advise him on policy issues.
The group, which will be announced at the National Prayer Breakfast, is geared to give ministers more input into policy decisions than previous administrations have allowed them to do.
"We'd like to see the faith community as a resource on policy issues," said the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and part of the new group. The new president wants a "robust partnership" with religious people, he added, and the council will be a mainstay of that arrangement.
"This would not just be on religious liberty but on issues that impact us directly," he added. "Who knows the streets and neighborhoods in our poorest cities than the faith community?"
The official announcement that Joshua DuBois will be Mr. Obama's new director for the White House faith-based office, renamed the Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, is also expected Thursday. He also will oversee the council.
Washington was buzzing Wednesday with the names of possible members, many of whom are heads of groups that worked with the presidential transition team. They included Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism whose office refused to comment on the record about the prospect.
An Orthodox rabbi who heads up a similar agency in the District also told The Washington Times he was on the list but did not want his name mentioned.
A list amassed by the Associated Press includes the Rev. Joel Hunter, a Longwood, Fla., pastor who is friends with the president; African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Vashti McKenzie; the Rev. Frank Page, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Judith Vredenburgh, president and chief executive officer of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America.
Mr. Hunter confirmed he and Mr. Page are on the list.
"I think we will meet as a group two to four times a year," he said. "Between that time, we will be a sounding board to the president and assist Joshua and encourage him in the exercise of his office. It's a pretty broad array of religious leaders."
During a July 2 speech in Zanesville, Ohio, Mr. Obama said a faith-based office would be the "moral center" of his administration.
Former President George W. Bush had a similar theological Kitchen Cabinet.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State put out a statement Wednesday, saying the faith-based office needs to be reformed, not expanded to include a ministers council

OBAMA'S ' STIMULUS BILL ' A WAR ON PRAYER ; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Democrats in Congress have declared war on prayer, say conservative groups who object to a provision in the stimulus bill that was passed by the House of Representatives last week.

The provision bans money designated for school renovation from being spent on facilities that allow "religious worship." It has ignited a fury among critics who say it violates the First Amendment and is an attempt to prevent religious practice in schools.
According to the bill, which the Democratic-controlled House passed despite unanimous Republican opposition, funds are prohibited from being used for the "modernization, renovation, or repair" of facilities that allow "sectarian instruction, religious worship or a school or department of divinity."
Critics say that could include public schools that permit religious groups to meet on campus. The House provided $20 billion for the infrastructure improvements, of which $6 billion would go to higher education facilities where the limitations would be applied.
"What the government is doing is discriminating against religious viewpoints," said Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that works to advance religious freedom.
"President Obama's version of faith-based initiatives is to remove the faith from initiative," said Staver, who believes Obama has "a completely different view on faith" from what he said during his presidential campaign.
"He is not the infallible messiah that some thought he would be," Staver said.
Civil liberty groups like the Americans United for Separation of Church and State vehemently defend the stimulus bill's provision, arguing that it in no way violates the Constitution.
"This provision upholds constitutional standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court and in no way affects student groups that meet on public school campuses," said the Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The American Civil Liberties Union also defends the constitutionality of the restriction, which they say has been the law since 1972.
"It's almost a restatement of what the Constitution requires so there's nothing novel in what the House did in its restriction," said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel to the ACLU. "For 37 years, the law of the land is that the government can't pay for buildings that are used for religious purposes."
Not so, says the Traditional Values Coalition, which issued a statement Wednesday charging that Obama is using his stimulus plan to restrict the exercise of religion in public facilities -- a provision it says violates the right to free speech.
"The economic crisis is being used as a pretext to curb religious liberty at institutions of higher learning," said Executive Director Andrea Lafferty.
"We are not asking that federal funding be used to construct a church, but if a campus ministry wants to hold a Bible study or Mass in the student activity building, we should be encouraging that -- not punishing a college for permitting it," she said.
According to some constitutional law experts, any complaint filed against the provision will gain little ground in court.
"Certainly the provision is treating the act of religious organizations differently from the activities of the school itself," Harvard University constitutional law professor Mark Tushnet told FOXNews.com.
"It's not frivolous to say there's a constitutional problem with excluding religious facilities from these grants, but I think the way of the law is in the other direction," he said.
Tushnet cited a 2004 Supreme Court case in which a Washington student lost a college scholarship awarded by the state after it was revealed that he planned to pursue a degree in pastoral ministries. Though the student argued that rescinding the money discriminated on the basis of religion, the court ruled in the state's favor -- declaring that the taxpayer-funded scholarship's restriction is constitutional.
The White House said Wednesday that it plans to keep in place the basic structure of the faith-based initiative office established by former President George W. Bush.
Administration officials said the office is a substantial programming and policy arm of the federal government, which allows federal agencies to connect with local neighborhood and faith-based groups to deliver social services.

IS OBAMA ADMINISTRATION THREAT TO FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS?

USA ― The implications of a change in administration in the United States could be potentially harmful to some faith-based organizations.
U.S. leadership has supported faith-based groups for the most part in the past and has especially recognized the importance of their service within the last eight to ten years, according to Ben Homan of Food for the Hungry.
Although all major presidential candidates in the recent election spoke in favor of faith-based organizations at some point in their campaigns, the Obama campaign also made movements in another direction. Within his campaign, suggestions were made about creating a nondiscrimination policy within faith-based organizations, therefore barring these ministries from hiring people based on their religion.
As this idea began to reappear, Food for the Hungry, along with World Vision and other major faith-based organizations, began to dialogue with Obama administrators to plead their case against such a decision. Since conversations began, the policy seems to have subsided, and Homan is hopeful that this will remain the case as relationships continue to be built.
"A change in leadership and the burden, the responsibility, that comes with that actually gives the church and faith-based organizations an opportunity to step up and to walk with a new leader," says Homan. "I think one of the callings that we have as followers of Christ is to walk in relationship with leaders and to stay in conversation, to stay in relationship, to stay engaged."
Homan has more reason to hope as both Biden and Obama have expressed the desire to raise the priority of foreign assistance -- a notion supported by other government branches as well. Homan says the new administration seems to have serious interest in helping to stop the growing HIV AIDS pandemic and in dealing with the global food crisis. A more than noticeable amount of the work being done to help solve these issues comes from faith-based organizations.
Regardless of whether new leadership makes alterations or not, Homan says Christians have a responsibility to continue dialoguing with the administration and to continue concern for world affairs. "The important thing in moving our civil society forward, and the important thing in moving the Gospel forward, is to stay in conversation and in relationship with leaders; and we're not always going to agree," says Homan. "I think this is a time for God's people to step up and make a difference."

BIG TURNOUT FOR FORMER OBAMA'S PASTOR

A year after then-candidate Barack Obama distanced himself from his controversial longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright thrilled thousands of churchgoers yesterday morning in Washington, giving a sermon holding up Obama as a spiritual symbol of possibility.

People waited two hours to hear Wright preach the Sunday service at Howard University's Cramton Auditorium, a high-profile platform for clergy, and black clergy in particular. Wright has preached the service, run by clergy at the school's Rankin Chapel, on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day for the past five years and was booked months before the election, school officials said.
Howard students, alumni and notables such as opera singer Jessye Norman and Morehouse College President Robert Michael Franklin Jr. attended the service, which overflowed into two other buildings. About 2,500 people came to see a man whose relationship with Obama became explosive, both among those who considered his words racist and anti-American and those livid with Obama for distancing himself from someone they saw as simply speaking truths about racism and war.
Wright was nothing but positive and conciliatory yesterday, rousing churchgoers again and again to their feet with a sermon about what he called the Bible's message of self-reliance and encouragement.
Wright went back and forth from Obama to a passage from the Gospel of John about people who overcome sickness and challenges. "No more seeing ourselves through the eyes of people who don't look like us!" he said. "How does God see us?"
In the impassioned oratory for which he is known, Wright said Obama was able, "as the Lord stepped into his story," to envision himself doing anything -- heading the Harvard Law Review, taking a U.S. Senate seat, even winning the presidency.

People who envision themselves as victims, he said, are like the sick and paralyzed in the Gospel of John.
"Stand up, downsized -- start your own business! Stand up, dropout -- go back to school! Stop wallowing in quicksand and stand up, black man -- and take care of your own family!"
But Wright's message wasn't all self-help. He told churchgoers that racism, capitalism and militarism remain strong negative forces and that people who don't recognize these forces at work in such things as the government's response to Sudan and Hurricane Katrina as well as the civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip are "blind." They, too, are like the crippled in John's Gospel, he said.
Outside the auditorium, communists handed out newspapers challenging the idea that Obama is a serious change agent. Vendors sold Obama souvenirs, including a T-shirt that depicts Obama outfitted like a member of hip-hop band Run-D.M.C. -- chunky glasses and gold chain -- with the words "Run DC." American flags were displayed everywhere, and people in coffee shops around Howard said to one another, "God bless America."
Wright saved his most provocative comments for another day. Kwandrick Sumler and Eddie Holiday, communications students at Howard, said they were drawn to the service out of curiosity about the controversial Wright and found him "neutral."
"He gave everyone what they wanted to hear," Holiday said. "The biggest thing African Americans need is solidarity, and he did that. He said, 'Do what you need to do.' "
Sumler agreed. "He was Obama's pastor, and Reverend Wright played on that: Only in America is Barack Obama's story possible."
Three alumnae from Spelman College, in town for the inauguration, went to Howard partly to be in church on Sunday and partly to hear Wright for themselves.
"He's still the minister he always was. I think he has a great ministry, but his time in the media wasn't very positive," said Michelle Bradley, 24, who came from Chicago. "And I feel today my constitutional rights have been lived out -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- by being here for the inauguration and Reverend Wright's sermon."