Last week, Senator Barak Obama explained how Democrats should appeal to Christians. First, Democratic politicians need to stop sneering at the 38 percent of Americans “who consider themselves committed Christians.” These people, the senator explained, just “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.”

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Second, Democrats need to recognize that churches form real communities, and African-American churches in particular understand “in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge the powers and principalities.” Democrats can therefore look to at least some Christians as naturally drawn to progressive politics. In that light, Obama calls on fellow Democrats “to communicate our hopes and values in a way that is relevant” to such Christians.

Third, Democrats need to a more religified rhetoric. “If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand their personal morality and social justice.” Lincoln used religious imagery; so did Martin Luther King. It can’t be all bad.

Fourth, by deploying Christian themes, Democrats can win hearts and minds, not just legal battles. “A transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers.”

And last, Obama explains that Democrats can reach out to Christians without fear of betraying their party’s commitment to the higher principles of inclusiveness and diversity. That’s because the good parts of Christianity are not “religion-specific,” but can be matched up with universal values.

Obama was speaking in Washington at “From Poverty to Opportunity: A Covenant for a New America,” a conference organized by the liberal Christian group, Call to Renewal. Founded in 1995, Call to Renewal claims to have “partnership with groups across the theological and political spectrum,” but take that with a grain of salt. Call’s most prominent figure is Jim Wallis, the left-leaning evangelical whose most recent book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, might be described as the manifesto of the emergent evangelical Left.

And that’s why Obama’s speech deserves attention. Obama, in Wallis’s terms, definitely “gets it.” Since his attention-grabbing speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama has rightly been recognized as a rising star of his party. On that occasion, he seemed to repudiate the racial resentment mongering that has become a standard part of Democratic campaigns. But a close reading of the text, as well as his subsequent statements, made clear that he was essentially triangulating. He was saying No to Sharpton-style race-baiting, but No as well to any politics that would abandon race-based grievances. Obama’s path is to veil racial grievances in the less-threatening diversity lingo of educrats and corporate human resource departments. Smart move.

Obama’s Call to Renewal speech similarly triangulates. He is looking for the sweet spot between the hard-core secularist worldview of many Democrats and the tough-minded Biblical literalism of many Christians. If it’s triangulation, it’s also tightrope walking. For the sake of those hard-core secularists, he needs to offer solid, pragmatic reasons for cozying up to Christians. For the sake of the Christians whom he hopes to persuade to support Democratic political ideas, he needs to offer solid, credible assurance that his party will take their faith seriously — and is not being merely pragmatic.

He woos the secularist side by reminding Democrats that there are so darn many of these committed Christian believers — 38 percent of Americans. They are organized, their church communities mobilize people, and they have access to a powerful way of speaking, which Democrats could use too. Religion, moreover, is a great motivator that could help capture elite opinion to support Democratic policies.

These points could come off sounding cynical and manipulative: a Machiavellian counsel that Democrats need not miss out on the banquet. But Obama is aware of the danger of coming across as someone who simply wants to channel religious convictions towards a political agenda and he explicitly repudiates such cold calculation. He declares, “Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith.” And, borrowing a metaphor from Jim Wallis, he compares such expressions to clapping off rhythm to the choir.

But how authentic can Democrats afford to be in this arena? Here we get to see Obama’s political mastery. If Abraham were to haul Isaac up to the roof of a church, knife in hand, he says, we would surely “call the police and the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham.” It is a deft move, quietly suggesting that we ought not to take all that Biblical stuff out of context. We need, as Obama puts it, “some sense of proportion,” and Americans “intuitively understand this.”

Surely he is right about all of these points, and what comes next is a modest step forward. His “sense of proportion” becomes the compass for navigating “the boundaries between church and state.” In this vein he offers carefully hedged support for the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, for voluntary student prayer groups to use school property, and for “certain faith-based programs targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers.”

But are these worthy steps? Or are they just the sorts of minor concessions that Democrats might need to make in order to join the conversation? Some of Obama’s remarks leave room for doubt. His depiction of Christians as people who “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives” continues as he says, “They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness…they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them — that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.”

Obama probably intends this as a fair depiction of Christian humility, but his condescension is a thick as pound cake at a church picnic. It sounds as though those people, the churchgoing Christians, are a rather sad lot. Unlike us, they haven’t got a real sense of purpose; unlike us, they are lonely; unlike us, they fear the existential nothingness. An unsympathetic listener might even hear the hint that we are rather proud of illusion-free commitments as we stare into the abyss of eternity.

Maybe Obama understands exactly how to translate Christian longing for redemption into words that the prideful heirs of his postmodern party can understand, but it doesn’t seem like an especially good way to reassure the evangelicals that he respects their ideas. Those ideas somehow come across in this rendition as improvised life rafts for people overwhelmed by their fears and insecurities. And Obama also seems to suggest that, with a little bit of coaching by their betters, these poor folk might realize that they can get a perfectly good sense of purpose, narrative arc, and cure for their loneliness by trading up to progressive politics. Somebody “out there” indeed cares for them. FDR, Bill Clinton, Barak Obama…

Obama’s tightrope walk faces another hitch when he enunciates the principle that “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.” The trouble is that religious folk (not just Christians) generally believe that they already are speaking to universal values. Most religiously committed people move effortlessly between the “religion-specific” rules of their congregation (whether-to-wear-a-hat-in-church style rules) and more general values (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”). In this sense, Obama’s distinction between universal and religion-specific values rings hollow.

And is it true that “democracy demands” allegiance to some sort of uprooted, context-free values? Like what? Obama doesn’t exactly say, but one word that he keeps returning to is “diversity.”

I would not like to misread Obama at this point. He is a serious man who may well one day lead the Democrats. But I am left with the uneasy sense that, once he has cleared away all those “religion-specific” values, what is left is mostly the ideological premises of his intellectually exhausted party. What does Obama take as the substance of those “universal values”? If he means a genuine and deep admiration for diversity, he is way off. Diversity is not a universal value. It is a political concoction that grew out of Justice Lewis Powell’s eccentric opinion in the 1978 Bakke case, which was then seized on and elaborated by campus Leftists in the 1980s. True, unlike most Leftist concepts, this one has achieved mainstream success. Taken up by corporate executives, by schoolteachers, and by the military as a less antagonistic way to promote racial quotas, diversity now almost has the feel of a universal value, for no better reason than that we live a society in which social elites chatter about it endlessly.

But it is best to remember that diversity is a relative newcomer to our national conversation — 202 years younger than our formal declaration of commitment to the ideals of freedom and equality; 2,500 years younger than the Greek enunciation of the ideals of reason and proportionality; and perhaps some 4,000 years younger than the Chinese enunciation of the ideals of complementarity, to mention only a few claimants to the status of “universal values.”

And diversity, of course, is not a constitutional principle — not unless we take Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 2004 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger as having written diversity into our Constitution. Even then, it is there only on loan, so to speak, since O’Connor famously wrote into her opinion a 25-year expiration clause.

What other compass points does Obama mention as possible universal values? Just one: “social justice.” Obama doesn’t unpack this phrase, but it generally points to government-enforced redistribution of private property according to the discretion of public officials. It has other convoluted meanings, but “social justice” is one of those nicely opaque terms that manages to sound wholesome while gesturing towards policies that, if plainly expressed, most Americans would strongly reject.

Obama is wise to keep his “universal values” discreetly in the background, out of the way of his pitch to fellow Christians. Explaining them would be awkward. His speech to the Call for Renewal conference, however, ended on a powerful note. He told a story about a Chicago physician who took exception to Obama characterizing (on his website) opponents to abortion as “right-wing ideologues.” That leaves no room, said the doctor, for people who oppose abortion on principled grounds. “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.” Obama took the message to heart (while blaming his staff in his speech for the offending words), met with the doctor, corrected his website, and went to bed with a prayer that “we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.”

Obama, the man who dares to tell a story of how he was chastened and abashed by the powerful words of a critic, and who learned his lesson and amended his ways — that Obama is a figure to be reckoned with. I am not persuaded that he or Jim Wallis will find much political traction with this appeal to evangelical Christians. After all, the mainstream Protestant churches and a fair number of Catholics have been allied with the political Left for half a century. The combination of Christian faith and liberal ideology is hardly new, and it appears mostly to have worked to the detriment of the churches that have embraced it. The mainstream Protestant churches have lost millions of members, while the evangelical churches have boomed.

While he probably won’t achieve a large-scale political shift among evangelicals, Obama has positioned himself well. If he peels off only a few percentage points from the Republican base, he will be able to shift the results of some elections. When the Angry Left burns itself out, where will the Democratic party go? It might well go with someone who seeks to reconcile “the beliefs of each with the good of all.” That prayer probably owes more to the creed of diversity than to The Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount, but no matter. Evangelicals and conservatives should pay heed. Sen. Obama’s attempt to graft the citrus branch of Christian piety to the hemlock tree of Democratic party just might bear fruit.

— Peter Wood, provost of The King's College in New York City, is author of Diversity: The Invention of A Concept.