Illinois Senator Barack Obama said, "My mother saw religion as an impediment to boader values...but she was a deeply spiritual person." R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky, takes issue with this in the Winter 2006 Wilson Quarterly. Mohler writes: "Where did Obama's mother discover her 'broader values'? What is their specific content? Without reference to some specific truth claim or structured thought, all this is little more than nonsensical wordplay, similar to pragmatist William James' definition of spirituality: 'Susceptibility to ideals, but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of "otherworldly" fancy.'

"Personally," Mohler says, "I have more respect for a clearheaded secularist than for someone who espouses this kind of mind-numbing relativism. If spirituality simply means a 'susceptibility to ideals,' does it even matter what those ideals are?"

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