The support for Obama is support for this message; the thirst for meaning even in the seeming desert of politics. Obama seems to have captured that longing. I don't believe it is a "brand" or "talking point" for him. I think it is part of his religious heritage.

The spiritual roots of hope are what I have learned more than anything else from African American spirituality. Here are people who were kidnapped, brutalized, treated as sub-human and held against their will in the most degraded conditions, and yet it is they who produced the spirituals (and the blues), the greatest forms of lyricism from the American pulpit and some of the most profound biblical interpretation in the history of Christianity. The deep meaning of hope is found in the fact that hope and suffering are inextricably linked.

Of course Obama learned “The Audacity of Hope” in church. When I am empty and tired and fed up, I too go to Trinity United Church of Christ to be inspired and renewed by the kind of community that knows that life is not just handed to you. You have to hope beyond hope and lift one another up to make it at all. When Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. recently retired as senior pastor at Trinity UCC, I emailed him that I considered him the best theologian, hands down, I had ever heard from the pulpit. And believe me, I’ve heard a lot of preaching in my life.

You can’t thrive as a person of faith unless you can believe and you can’t believe unless you can hope. The poetics of the pulpit, rich with theological concepts like hope, are what enables us to listen to the song of the soul. “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, And sings the tune—without the words, And never stops at all.”

“Poetry is not a luxury,” wrote Audre Lorde. Life is so hard, we need inspiration like we need air, like we need bread, like we need water, like we need God. The “religious fervor” some claim to see in the Obama campaign is part of the larger human need for a higher meaning and purpose. At least, I hope it is.