I've heard the chatter for months across black Los Angeles, at cocktail parties, church socials and coffee shops:
The election of Barack Obama was not just about politics, but providence. Obama was anointed by prophecy to lead. His election is a reflection of God's grace and of black Christians' fealty.
But whenever I brought my notebook out, most people clammed up.
The sentiments were no surprise. And neither was the public unease.
"Don't go there," warned a shopper, who would give her name only as Martha when I broached the subject at Eso Won bookstore in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles. I told her I wanted to write about it.
"Don't taint yourself with that," she advised. "Go the intellectual route instead."
Yet, in the wake of Obama's historic election, I found it hard to ignore the theories of religious destiny percolating through the black community -- fueled by theology, coincidence, history and a profound sense of awe that an African American man is about to become the leader of the world's most powerful democracy.
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"I have no doubt this is God's work," Latoya Jackson told me last month, as we sat at the bar and talked after we met over dinner at an Encino soul food restaurant.
A graduate of UC Berkeley, studying for her master's degree in international relations at New York University, she was intelligent, enthusiastic and refreshingly blunt.
"God said it's time," and Obama was uniquely prepared by virtue of his education and family background, Jackson said. "We needed a charismatic individual, and God sent him. It couldn't have been anyone else but Barack Obama."
She's convinced this country is on the verge of divinely inspired change. She pulled out her cellphone and showed me the scriptural confirmation she had sent, via text message, to her friends -- a passage from the Old Testament Book of Judges: "Arise, Barak, and lead away thy captives."
Some African Americans find the religious fulminating embarrassing, and worry that it tarnishes Obama's accomplishment and ignores America's social progress.
"Ridiculous," said Eso Won co-owner James Fugate, before I could even finish asking about it. "People forget this guy worked hard, got good grades, did work in the community. . . . He's a smart guy who knew how to present himself. And he ran the best campaign this country has ever seen."
