Shelby Steele thinks that Barack Obama needs to figure out who he really is.

In contrast, a cross-cultural researcher and author, Ruth Van Reken, thinks Steele is confused about Obama’s identity. She sees both Sen. Obama, and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, as third culture kids (TCK).

TCKs are raised outside their parents’ home cultures and often learn to build bridges between different cultures. That background is good preparation for 21st Century leadership, in her view, but can be a challenge for commentators who want to define candidates by older racial and cultural categories.

Steele is a Hoover Institution fellow. He’s conservative on values issues and comes from a family similar to Obama’s, with a black father and white mother. His book, A Bound Man, contends that Obama is mixed up personally and politically. “Barack Obama is a man who truly wants to be black, a man who is determined to resolve the ambiguity he was born into,” Steele writes. Politically, Steele notes that Obama has transcended race with gifted political skills and an appealing story with hope for racial reconciliation. But Steele argues that Obama is stuck in the left wing of the Democratic Party. Except for his liberal voting record, what does Obama really believe, and why is he vague about it? “Obama seems most pained when he is pressed for his true beliefs,” Steele writes. “Obama is the very opposite of a Reagan-like conviction politician. Strong convictions seem to be anathema to Barack Obama.”

Steele thinks he also is confused about his personal identity. “He has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life,” Steele writes. “That he would join a church this steeped in blackness, with so many other churches available, only underscores his determination to be transparently black.”

He also contends that Obama was brought up with traditional values and responsibility and has practiced them in his personal life. But politically he has not embraced that view fully, perhaps because of his political allegiances. “He offers no thinking on how to build incentives to responsibility into actual social policy,” Steele writes.

“If Barack Obama crossed the road, so to speak, away from what government systems can do, and began to talk about individual responsibility as the purest and most immediate form of social power available to the poor, he would surely suffer Bill Cosby’s fate,” Steele contends. “So he is a bound man. He cannot be himself without hurting himself politically. His mother’s humble and clear idea of responsibility—which served him so well—would put his political fortunes at risk were he to adopt it.”

Steele thinks that Obama should figure out his deep convictions. “Unless we get to know who he is—what beliefs he would risk his life for—he could become a cautionary tale in his own right, an iconic figure who neglected to become himself.”

Meanwhile, Ruth Van Reken is an Indianapolis-based coauthor of Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds. Raised in a missionary family in Nigeria, she served on the mission field in Liberia for many years and raised her children there with her husband, David, a physician.

She thinks that political pundits are missing a key fact about both presidential candidates. Each is an adult third culture kid (TCK), spending developing mental years outside their passport culture. Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, while McCain was born in the Canal Zone and grew up as a military child in the Pacific. TCKs, including children of missionaries, are also identified as global nomads and have become the subject of research and study.

TCKs, like many homeschooled young people, often have stronger relationships with adults. They also can be perceived as arrogant—a charge slapped against both Obama and McCain in different contexts. The arrogance can be real, yet understandable, because the world looks different to them as a result of their multicultural experiences.

Many TCKs develop a sense of a both/and identity, rather than the traditional either/or identity common to those growing up in one culture. “The problem isn’t their sense of identity,” says Van Reken. “The problem comes when Steele or political pundits try to fit them back into traditional assumptions of cultural/racial identity.”

She contends that Steele’s background is not as close to Obama’s as it appears at first glance, though they both come from biracial families. “As a child of mixed parentage born in the U.S. in 1945, surely we can assume that Steele had many and ugly results of prejudice to deal with,” Van Reken says. “Undoubtedly, many of his own views were shaped by the laudable decisions he had to make along the way to not be bound by many of society’s judgments against him, but to decide who he was and what principles he would live by, no matter what.”

Obama comes from a much different background. “Obama is one of the millions of people across our globe who grew up among many different cultural worlds rather than the traditional, mostly monocultural, experiences of the past,” Van Reken argues. “Ironically, among the common characteristics of these third culture kids is the capacity to be cultural bridges, to be able to see both sides of a situation because of having learned to see the world through different cultural lenses as children. This could be one of the greatest strengths a politician could have in today’s world, where no nation can remain an island, and someone with the capacity to listen and hear other points of views thoughtfully is needed.”

What about McCain? “He is seen as a maverick,” she says, “because he frequently won’t stay in his assigned box and has often voted across party lines. He has been willing to reach across assigned divides.”

McCain likely is not aware of his background in this context. Van Reken contends, “I think he has no idea of his own identity as a TCK and, like countless ones of our generation, learned to hide this inconvenient truth, for we were so severely judged by it. He and Obama are seen as flip-floppers because both are now again trying to fit an assigned box, when part of their original strength on both sides was their out-of-box-ness.”

She contends that this election raises questions beyond who will win the presidency. “We are in the middle of a great social change, a development/cultural shift that we have never done before,” Van Reken says.

She sees part of the answer in the first chapter of Genesis, with Christians having an open door to demonstrate that each person is made in the image of God. “We have common needs as human beings—the need for love, for a sense of significance,” she said. “It is that place of commonality where we can relate to others, for we can know them in these places even when our cultures are vastly different.”

The question is not just whether we can all get along. “This is like a watershed moment for our country. We will face these shifts in our world, move forward through them, and find new ways of defining and relating. Or we will wind up in the tribalism of so many other countries.”

That question is more cultural than political, and goes well beyond politics or this presidential campaign. But, ironically, both presidential candidates are quietly, and rather unconsciously, bringing the issue before the voters.

—By Russ Pulliam

Russ Pulliam is a contributing editor to the Witness. He is a ruling elder in the Second (Indianapolis, Ind.) RPC.