By Omar M. McRoberts

(CNN) -- At the middle of his first presidential term, Barack Obama faces major electoral challenges, some of which have come to involve questions of religious identity and power.

A few have revived suspicion about Obama's religious identity, especially after he said he supported New York's decision to permit the construction of an Islamic cultural center near the site of ground zero.

At the same time, some prominent black figures have accused Obama of ignoring African-American concerns and tens of millions of "churched" black voters. On the one hand, Obama faces religious xenophobia; on the other, he faces the mobilization of critical voices among a religious population that Democrats have long taken for granted.

With fierce midterm election battles at hand and his prospects for a second term as president uncertain, we might expect Obama to revisit the strategy of a president who faced similar religious challenges more than 70 years ago: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the lead-up to Roosevelt's own re-election in 1936, some religious sectors charged his New Deal and the repeal of Prohibition constituted an attack on traditional Christian values.

Meanwhile, he could hardly take for granted the black vote. The Democratic Party was understood as the party of the openly violent Jim Crow South, where millions of African Americans remained disenfranchised. But by the middle of his first term, Roosevelt and the Democratic National Committee knew they would need to reach out to Northern black voters, who were growing in numbers yet had been only partly swayed by the limited availability of New Deal emergency relief.

Criticism from black churches was on the rise, just as it seems to be now. In 1934, right at the midpoint of the first Roosevelt administration, the major black denominations formed the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, specifically to push a social justice agenda and protest, if need be, at the national level. Black religious publications reported racial discrimination in Roosevelt's New Deal and were incredulous about his refusal to promote an anti-lynching bill.

Roosevelt, in his electoral strategy, reached out extensively to African-American local and national religious leaders, including those of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, through the Good Neighbor League of the National Democratic Party.

The league recruited sympathetic clergy to lead political discussion clubs in black congregations and planned major events in churches in 25 Northern cities. These events highlighted the New Deal's tangible benefits to black people, portrayed the New Deal and Roosevelt himself as rooted in "social gospel" values of equality and justice and elevated certain Fraternal Council leaders to positions of unprecedented visibility.

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