7. Religious views

Obama is a Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life.He wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he "was not raised in a religious household". He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing Methodists and Baptists"), as being detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known." He described his father as a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful."

Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change."

In January 2008, Obama told Christianity Today: "I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life."On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views saying "I'm a Christian by choice. My family didn't—frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."

Obama met Trinity United Church of Christ pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright in October 1987, and became a member of Trinity in 1992. He resigned from Trinity in May 2008 during his first presidential campaign after some of Wright's statements were criticized. After a prolonged effort to find a church to attend regularly in Washington, Obama announced in June 2009 that his primary place of worship would be the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David.

External links

Official links

1. Official website (Campaign) - https://www.barackobama.com/

2. Official website of President Barack Obama (White House) - https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama

3. Official website of The Barack Obama Foundation - http://www.barackobamafoundation.org/

4. Barack Obama at DMOZ https://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Government/Executive_Branch/President/POTUS_Barack_Obama

Other

5. Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress - http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=o000167

6. Profile at Project Vote Smart - http://votesmart.org/candidate/9490/barack-obama-ii#.VU-xuZCmdZg

7. Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission- http://www.fec.gov/fecviewer/CandidateCommitteeDetail.do?&tabIndex=1&candidateCommitteeId=P80003338

8. Collected news and commentary at the Chicago Tribune - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/keyword/barack-obama

9. Collected news and commentary at the Tampa Bay Times's PolitiFact.com

10. Collected news and commentary at The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog - http://www.washingtonpost.com/

11. Works by Barack Obama at Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/authors/search/?query=Obama,+Barack

12. Works by or about Barack Obama at Internet Archive - http://archive.org