Obama in Lynchburg: The Faith-versus-Works Debate

Here’s a photo I took this weekend while driving through Lynchburg, the central Virginia town where religious right leader Jerry Falwell ministered and built Liberty University. The sign outside this small church reads, as you can see: “USA TELL OBAMA JESUS CHRIST NEEDED FOR SALVATION READ ACTS 4:12.”

Part of the reason this sign caught my attention is that I’d just read, via Religion News Service in the Washington Post’s religion news section (yes, they do have one - buried in the Metro section on Saturdays) a fantastic article by journalist Benedicta Cipolla: “On the Campaign Trail, Democrats Put Their Faith in the Book of James.” (A more complete version of the story is on the website of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, the PBS show devoted to covering religion news.)

In the article, Cipolla points out how Democrats like Obama, Clinton and even John Kerry in 2004 have often quoted from the New Testament Book of James – in particular, this passage:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. (NRSV translation, James 2:14-17)

Missy Daniel, the editor at Religion & Ethics Newsweekly who assigned the story to Cipolla told me she had been noticing this trend toward quoting James among Democrats partly because her friend E.J. Dionne was tracking it as well, first writing about John Kerry’s reference to James in 2004.

Yet Cipolla writes that James is an “overlooked and sometimes criticized book of the Bible.” And what’s the problem? Many Protestants, beginning with Martin Luther, saw this book as contradicting the idea that Christians are justified, or saved, through faith alone — meaning that the main thing is accepting and recognizing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Here’s where the Lynchburg church billboard comes in. The pastor seems to be taking a shot at Obama’s James-like emphasis on works alongside faith. In the campaign’s much-dissected flyer aimed at voters in Kentucky, for example, Obama is quoted as saying: “My faith teaches me I can sit in church all I want and pray, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.”

On the church billboard, however, the pastor is urging us to read Acts 4: 12:

There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.

in other words, “by faith alone.”

Now, I wanted to interview the Larry W. Fitzgerald, the pastor of the church in this picture — the Central Baptist Church — but let me assure other journalists out there that he’s not an easy man to find. I googled him up, down, and backwards, searching through numerous online phone directories and even called Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg (now pastored by Jonathan Falwell, son of Jerry) for advice. A very friendly and helpful man there searched through the local phone book, and his own memory, for me, but found nothing. He suggested the church may be so small that it has no church office or even phone number.

I also stopped by the brand-new Obama office in Lynchburg, which happened to be empty and locked this past Monday afternoon. Inside were hanging two hand-painted signs: the one in the picture (”Obama ‘08″) and the other reading, “Hope.” (And yes, that’s my reflection in the glass, expert photographer that I am.)

It made news when the Obama campaign announced it was opening ten regional campaign offices in Virginia, including this one in Lynchburg. As Virginia state senator John Edwards (D-Roanoke) said at the kick-off event covered by the Washington Post’s Tim Craig:

A lot of these places may have never had a presidential campaign before. It shows [Obama] is investing in the commonwealth and it is a bottom-up, not a top-down campaign.

Campaign office or no campaign office, evangelical outreach or no evangelical outreach, it looks like folks in Lynchburg are already talking about Obama — but he still has some distance to go to win over the pastor at Central Baptist Church.