by Huda Ahmed & Japhet Weeks / photos by Yulia Weeks
This past weekend, just a few days before the presidential elections came to a long-awaited conclusion, religious leaders in Berkeley and Oakland opened their different sacred texts to the same page.
A rabbi, a pastor and an imam urged their faithful to vote on Tuesday. And though none of them endorsed a particular candidate, all three men are backing Barack Obama.
According to a recently published national survey conducted by the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, religious groups are oriented politically the same way they were four years ago, with only slight differences. The black Protestant vote, for example, which tends to be democratic, is even more heavily so this year as compared to four years ago. The Jewish vote, on the other hand, is less decidedly democratic than it was in 2004. The survey did not include Muslim voters.
