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"If you're organizing churches," they said, "it might be helpful if you went to church once in a while." And I thought, "Well, I guess that makes sense." And it puts the lie to the notion that the separation of church and state in America means faith should have no role in public life. This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he's worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism. They could've heard words of anger and discord. Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society.
But I also get the sense that there's a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any single cause or issue. And when the Civil War was fought and our country dedicated itself to a new birth of freedom, they took on the problems of an industrializing nation - fighting the crimes against society and the sins against God that they felt were being committed in our factories and in our slums. But we shouldn't use our humility as an excuse for inaction. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.
Our conscience can't rest so long as 37 million Americans are poor and forgotten by their leaders in Washington and by the media elites. Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. Theirs are the stories that shaped me.
But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me. And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. Because it's not who we are. I don't know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.
Thank you very much everybody.