That's a question reporters sometimes used to ask me before a major address by the president or a presidential candidate back in 2008.
Let me explain. A "Scripture bomb" is my term for the citation, whether explicit or covert, whether verbatim or glossed, of words from the Bible by a politician during an important speech.
Going into tonight's State of the Union I gave my standard prediction: "the over/under is three citations from the 'Good Book'" (if the speaker, however, is Mike Huckabee, George W. Bush, or Joseph Lieberman circa 2000, then the number raises to five).
Well, now that the speech is over --it was pretty good --it is clear that Obama went "under." Indeed, on my
live blog for my colleagues over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, I referred to it as "The Education SOU."
Obama spoke, generically, of America as "a light to the world" (invoking
Isaiah 51:4). Perhaps his reference to "a
better place beyond the horizon" is an allusion to
Luke 14:10. So at 1.5 Scripture bombs it seems that the president mostly avoided the Bible last night.
I can't remember any president in any one speech referring to education, teachers, college, campus, science, technology, research, development, and so forth, more than Obama did tonight.
What does it all mean for faith and values campaigning in 2012? This is an interesting question. As you may recall, F&V pundits such as myself lived large in 2008.
It seemed that every day offered us a fresh implosion, whether it be Reverend Wright, or Pastor Hagee, or Mike Huckabee (all blessings be upon him), or Pastor Warren's "cone of silence." Those were the days, 2008. Good times.
But I am starting to wonder if 2012 will be different. Some have speculated that the Democrats are nowhere near as mobilized around faith communities and religious issues as they were in the previous presidential election.
Republicans, for their part, may be pondering a truism about the white evangelical voters who delivered so graciously for them in 2004: you can't win your party's nomination if you ignore the GOP's evangelical base, but if you trumpet that base's concerns too loudly then you risk alienating massive sectors of the non-evangelical electorate in a general election.
In any case, Obama's address was unusually bereft of God talk. Conservative Christian constituencies who prefer that we honor God in the public square may take note of the "under."
