GREENS recruiting GOD

It appears the Socialist do have a use for the religious community, to help spread the word of the new religion.

Pelosi said she supports that effort and is working with evangelical activists on the common goals of protecting the environment and helping the poor. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080719/D921518O0.html

But to achieve the success we know is possible, we need to build strong alliances with some new participants, such as faith-based organizations. This natural overlap with good stewardship of the Earth and caring about air quality has exciting potential. In fact, the District is conducting intensive, targeted outreach to segments of the community such as the faith-based community, which have not previously been at the forefront of the air-quality dialogue. The Air District is looking forward to working with this vibrant and engaging community.

The Limits of Hope: Obama is selling heaven, but his product isn’t new
National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/ April 7, 2008 by Jonah Goldberg
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_6_60/ai_n25490916/print?tag=artBody;col1

MY colleague Kate O’Beirne once told me the story of her brief meeting with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. The O’Beirne family met the pontiff at his private Mass. He chatted pleasantly with her sons about soccer and whatnot, and then moved on to others in the pews.

Or at least that’s what Kate has been told. She doesn’t remember the conversation at all, so awed was she by the encounter. I was reminded of this sweet story when I read about Kim Mack, who was looking for a mere presidential candidate but found much more in Barack Obama. “He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words,” Mack told the Sacramento Bee. She’s now a field organizer for Obama. “Obama hugged her and whispered something in her ear,” the newspaper reported, but “she was so thrilled she doesn’t remember what it was.”

Mack is not exceptional. Obama recruiters are encouraged to proselytize not by talking about “issues” but by testifying about how they “came to” the candidate, in much the way born-again Christians testify about how they “came to Jesus.” At Obama rallies, bouts of a modern-day St. Vitus’s dance break out spontaneously among the more devoted. At least half a dozen cases of Obamaniacs’ getting the vapors and fainting from the rapture have been recorded.

Obama’s apostles include his wife, Michelle, who insists she is “married to the only person in this race who has a chance at healing this nation.” And why does Obama need to lay hands upon America? “We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls because, you see, our souls are broken.” He will demand much of us, she says. “The change Barack is talking about is hard, so don’t get too excited, because Barack is going to demand that you, too, be different.”

Much of the messianic language is more New Age than New Testament. “He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians,” says Gary Hart, who describes Obama as “the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century.” Deepak Chopra, guru to the rich and gullible, exults that an Obama victory would bring about “a quantum leap in American consciousness,” while prominent “leadership coach” Eve Konstantine assures us that the highest expression of the collective American soul has finally materialized: “Barack Obama is our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings.... He’s our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence.”

Most famously, Oprah Winfrey insists that Barack is The One—because we don’t simply need politicians who can tell the truth, “we need politicians who know how to be the truth.” King’s College political scientist David Innes notes the similarity to Jesus’s “messianic claim to divinity” in John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Winfrey does not get that explicitly religious. Rather, she claims that Obama will help us “evolve to a higher plane.” She loves Obama because “he is an evolved leader who can bring evolved leadership to our country.”

This conviction that Obama will take America to the next level, that he will hasten the march of progress, is infectious. The excitable Ezra Klein speaks for many who’ve been ignited by Obama’s spark, writing for The American Prospect: “Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.” Obama is the truth, Obama is the way, and he promises that—with your help—he can “create a kingdom right here on earth.”

A MESSIAH’S BEGETTING

As creepy as all this is, it’s hardly unprecedented. When Obama won the “Chesapeake primary,” he held a victory rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “And where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the progressive movement was born?” Obama proclaimed. He may not have realized how fitting his rhetorical question was. The progressives, too, believed they were poised to transcend. They too spoke of politics in religious terms and of religion in political terms.

Richard Ely, the most influential progressive intellectual, long ensconced at the University of Wisconsin, believed that redemption was no longer an individual enterprise but a collective endeavor dependent upon the actions of the State. “In Ely’s eyes,” writes historian Jean B. Quandt, “government was the God-given instrument through which we had to work.... He thought of government as God’s main instrument of redemption; and he defined the needed ‘religious revival’ in the cities as a deepening sense of ethical obligation on the part of the citizenry.”

Ely’s postmillennial “Christian sociology” allowed him to cherry-pick both the Bible and Darwin to forge a kind of Marxist messianism in which both science and Scripture endorsed his “new nationalism.”

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ely claimed to have come to his vision of religion via his study of economics.

In a complementary way, Walter Rauschenbusch, the leading social-gospel minister of the progressive era, came to his understanding of economics through religion. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life,” he insisted. “Unless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order, back we shall go to Capitalism.... The God that answereth by low food prices, let him be God.”

These were not fringe views among progressives.

This vision was central to the new age of collectivism that both priests and professors saw arising either from the cold impersonal forces of history or with the guiding hand of God. “We believe,” a social-gospel organization announced confidently in 1914, “that the age of sheer individualism is past and the age of social responsibility has arrived.”

Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic, prophesied that adherents of the “scientific method” would need to join with the “ideologists” of Christ, in order “to plan and to effect a redeeming transformation” of society whereby men would look for “deliverance from choice between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation.”

For a time, the Barack Obama of the progressive era was none other than Teddy Roosevelt. At the 1912 Progressive-party convention, described by the New York Times as a “convention of fanatics,” speeches were punctuated by the singing of hymns and shouts of “Amen!” “It was not a convention at all,” the Times reported. “It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts. It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp meeting done over into political terms.”

The delegates sang “We Will Follow Jesus,” but with the name “Roosevelt” replacing the now-outdated savior. Roosevelt told the rapturous audience, “Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness.... We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Compare all of this with Obamania. His followers believe that he will be the instrument by which we evolve to a higher, more cooperative level. His cult of personality surpasses that of John F. Kennedy (at least during JFK’s life) and rivals TR’s. William Allen White, the famed progressive writer, recalled in 1934 that he’d been “a young arrogant protagonist of the divine rule of the plutocracy” until Roosevelt “shattered the foundations of my political ideals. As they crumbled then and there, politically, I put his heel on my neck and I became his man.”

Those who “came to Obama” make similar declarations. A personal favorite, from the actress Halle Berry: “I’ll do whatever he says to do. I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

Obama himself promises to close the “empathy deficit” by requiring Americans to do more for each other. “Unity is the great need of the hour—the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.” TR proclaimed that we were at Armegeddon; Obama insists that we are like Joshua’s troops at Jericho. And that if we could “stand together” and “speak with one voice,” the walls of injustice “would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The mechanism for this new era of cooperation is not civil society, but the Obama administration—or, more accurately, the Obama “movement.” “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is one of Obama’s stump refrains.

We can arrive at this new state of consciousness by—what else?—believing in Obama.

The banner at his website reads: “I’m asking you to believe.” Of course, you need not believe, but if enough of your fellow citizens believe, then their belief will become your reality, whether you like it or not.

Religion, according to Obama, “tells us about our obligations to one another.” Fair enough, but he also thinks that religion tells us what kind of government we need to have:

“If changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there,” Obama declared at Ebenezer Baptist Church. “It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms.... The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed.”

“Obama speaks as if the first move of someone faithful to God’s word is to call for government action, not to act directly through his or her own charitable efforts,” writes Joseph Knippenberg, an Oglethorpe University political scientist and close student of Obama’s religious rhetoric. “Those who don’t engage in political action of the sort he approves are apparently hypocrites, satisfied with mere words.” Obama’s “awesome God,” writes Knippenberg, “is a thoroughgoing, card-carrying Democrat.” In other words, let the God that answereth with single-payer health care be God.

NEW AGE GNOSIS

Two points need to be made here. First, Obama’s stance that his religious conviction is also a political mandate is not unique to him.

It is, in fact, the dogma of the Democratic party, though until fairly recently Democrats had a difficult time expressing it.

In 2004, John Kerry explained that his faith requires him to support the welfare state, environmentalism, civil rights, etc. “I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people.” But he also said, “I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith.”

This bit, of course, is the standard pro-choice catechism all Democrats are obliged to recite.

But Kerry, like most Democrats, appears incapable of appreciating the cognitive dissonance here. If your faith guides your left-wing policies on, say, property rights, then how is seizing someone’s home or wealth any less an example of “legislating your faith” on others?

But, for the foreseeable future, the pro-choice God shall be the God of the Democratic party.

Second, there is the question “Why?” The messianic nature of progressive politics in general and Obama in particular has gotten a thorough airing of late, but less discussed is why progressivism has that nature. A good place to start such an investigation would be the pages of NATIONAL REVIEW during the Cold War.

For decades, many of this magazine’s greatest contributors—Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and, of course, William F. Buckley Jr.—debated the extent to which liberalism was a political religion kindred to the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. These writers were deeply indebted to the German emigre philosopher Eric Voegelin, who argued that progressivism—the more precise label for modern liberalism—was part of the same ideological garment as Europe’s authoritarian movements.

Voegelin argued that progressivism, like other political religions, manifested itself as a form of gnosticism.

In both its ancient and modern forms, gnosticism has two core assumptions.

First, it condemns the existing world as broken and alienating, plagued by evil forces preventing a complete and happy restoration of man’s spiritual and material life. In other words—Michelle Obama’s in fact—the world is a place of broken souls. But the gnostic promise, to borrow a phrase from John Edwards, is that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Enter the second core assumption: Gnostic political religions promise (in Russell Kirk’s words) “a mode of deliverance or salvation from the prison of the world for man through a secret gnosis.”

That is, with just the right mixture of abracadabra words and prestidigitatory politics we can create a “kingdom of heaven on earth”—not coincidentally, a phrase invoked by Bolsheviks, progressives, fascists, and every other variety of utopian collectivist.

This effort to lasso the hereafter and pull it down to the here-and-now was dubbed by Voegelin “immanentizing the eschaton.” (”Don’t immanentize the eschaton” was a popular button among WFB’s readers).

What is this gnosis, this secret knowledge that can usher in a perfect world? That varies.

For the Marxists, the secret lay in the intricacies of “scientific socialism.” With just the right manipulation of material or historical forces we could—ta-da!—create a land where each lives according to his need. For the Marxist, Voegelin quipped, “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come.”

For the progressives, the trick was giving ourselves over to the social planners and gnostic “ideologists of Christ.” And today, the secret is Barack Obama.

For some that is quite literally true. A group called Bring Us Change has released a video in which children testify about the dire state of the world. “In this time of great despair has come a great gift,” explains a narrator, who appears to be about six or seven years old.

When she says this, the video cuts to a baby opening a copy of The Audacity of Hope, complete with a whispery spirit voice promising a “secret.” The video concludes with one child after another announcing that the secret is—Barack Obama.

The makers of this creepy agitprop, not to mention Obama himself, know little to nothing about the intellectual precursors of their political religion. And that is a major theme of Voegelin’s argument. Utopian desires are part of the human condition, and the craving to create a heaven on earth is the inevitable consequence of a godless society.

“Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization,” Voegelin insisted.

Indeed, the story of totalitarianism is the story of men trying to replace the allegedly discredited old God with one of their own creation. “When God is invisible behind the world,” Voegelin writes, “the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”

This purely political “science” becomes, in effect, the new faith dedicated to the “redivinization of society.” Which explains liberals’ oddly passionate reactions when faced with conservative disagreement.

Those who take the slogan “If you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem” as a spiritual imperative (whether they see it as spiritual or not) are inclined to take disagreement or apathy not as dissent, but as heresy.

Moreover, when God is no longer the measure of man, man—or mankind—becomes the object of worship. (It shouldn’t surprise us that Herbert Croly, the indispensable intellectual of modern liberalism, was literally baptized into Auguste Comte’s “Religion of Humanity,” in which great scientists and statesmen were designated “saints.”)

When there is no power other than “people power,” worship of people power becomes the new faith. Members of the movement worship themselves. Or, in Voegelin’s words, they “build the corpus mysticum of the collectivity and bind the members to form the oneness of the body.”

Or again, in Barack Obama’s words, we quite become the ones we’ve been waiting for. There is where progressivism meets populism.

Populism, after all, is ultimately a form of narcissism in which an individual’s self-regard and self-pity are multiplied by the population of the mob.

My grievances become our grievances, and the satisfaction of grievance is the only true measure of what is right.

As Willie Stark says to the masses in All the King’s Men, “Your will is my strength, and your need is my justice.” In a rightly ordered society, such sentiments are better directed toward God than toward a throng of angry supplicants.

Obamania is doomed to fail for the same reason all such movements are doomed to failure: You can’t create a heaven on earth. You can’t immanentize the eschaton.

The perfect life, if it exists at all, must be found in the next life. But even though utopian dreams are forever out of reach, there’s no reason for us to assume that people won’t always strive for them.

Such is both the audacity, and the folly, of hope. ~

*
Also see: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg
Released January 8, 2008 http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841

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