If you haven’t been to http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/ you’re missing a treat. Just be preapred to have your nose tweaked. You know who you are!!

His record as a Senator is average, which it should be for someone in their first term. He has no military experience. He has little foreign affairs experience. He has never administered any government agency of significance. A visit to his website reveals a platform cobbled together from excerpts of speeches and standard liberal boilerplate. So why is Sen. Barack Obama so popular?

Some have proposed a kind of “Clinton fatigue” among Democrats. The party faithful have had enough of Bill, and Hillary, who’s ascendence was in his wake, is descending accordingly. Some have thought her votes for the Iraq war have cost her dearly among the well organized and financed anti-war leftists who control large sections of the Democrat machinery and by and large flocked to Sen. Obama. Others have speculated that in the PC culture of the Democrat party Sen. Obama has the personal demographics to make him a multi-culturalist’s dream candidate. There’s as many ideas as pundits but perhaps there’s something more.

People who measure such things have increasingly noticed that the Democrat party has become the secular party, a place where non-believers and liberal believers have found a home and one that has grown increasingly intolerant of traditional or historic faiths and the idea of transcendent truth. Surveys on religious affiliation and political party trend, as a rule, sharply to identifying the party as the choice of non-believers, agnostics, and liberal believers of all stripes. Anecdotally it would be hard to identify, for example, a single prominent national politician of the party with a consistent pro-life record and the party as a whole is moving as quickly as it can without incurring the wrath of the folks back home in embracing an agenda of marriage and family unmoored from historic norms. It could reasonably be said, except for perhaps the interesting fixation of African American evangelicals and pentecostals in the Democrats, that the party is a kind of political wing for the unitarian universalist movement in this country. And therein lies a possible clue.

Could it be that Sen. Obama’s success comes from his ability to, perhaps even unconciously, tap into the spiritual hunger of a group of people who’ve long abandoned traditional forms and create a kind of spiritual energy with vague catch phrases like “We are the change we’ve been waiting for…” and a kind of elocution and energy long on emotion and short on troubling things like substance that fills a void of the increasingly secular Left? Has Sen. Obama, in fact, created a kind of “political pentecostalism” complete with an emotional contact to a kind of transcendency that allows the fervor of religion without having to actually believe in anything other than believing, a perfect kind of faith for a party increasingly faithless in the traditional sense?

This at least is an interesting possibility. People who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Benny Hinn event or in the mega pews of a Joel Osteen have perhaps found in Sen. Obama the preacher they’ve been looking for, someone like them who makes them feel good, insists on little except supporting the preacher, and requires none of the contemplation or sacrifice that comes with maturity in faith or politics. Whether he stumbled on this by accident or it’s a product of purpose and design it may be possible the Senator has effectively taken the the ethos of so much of our current Christian culture, shallow, emotional, form without substance, and grafted it to a kind of generic secular vision laced with words evocative of spirituality and in doing so created a hybrid packing all the emotional wallop of a camp meeting but with no larger altar call then to vote for him.

Will it work? We’ll see. But in a time such as ours it could happen and that says a lot about where we are, how far we may have to travel, and what tasks lie ahead for us as Orthodox Christians.

More on the cult of Obama, this time it’s MSNBC journalist Chris Matthews falling under the spell.

This has sort of taken a life of its own from curious news item to cultural fad and its getting both fun and wierd to watch from a distance.

Lent rebranded as “Christian Ramadan“…

That sound is me banging my head on the table.

This time women are acting like Sen. Obama is the Beatles…

Imagine how different the world really would be if those who follow Christ had the same passion, minus, of course, the whole Beatles fan thing.

This time from Australia.

Now if you wonder why I’m linking this I’ll explain. People, I believe, are naturally “messianic” that is they’re attracted to people who they perceive are larger than life or larger than themselves or who they see as the solution to their problems or providing some other kind of solace.

This can be fairly harmless as in kids pretending to be their favorite football player or even positive as in our Orthodox openness to embracing and emulating Saints as they model Christ. There’s a line, though, sometimes nearly invisible, between a normal human admiration and transcendent veneration and as that line is crossed danger is not far behind. The danger is rooted in our own human brokenness and the reality that both we, and those we consider heroic, are still human and transcendent veneration will always bump up aganst that humanity and sometimes with horrible effect.

In the article linked above the author contemplates what may happen if a surge of people actually propel Sen. Obama into the presidency only to discover that this larger than life image, skillfully crafted, disappears into the real world of actually running a government. What will happen when they discover that this person, so eloquent in front of cameras, is, in actuality, a person and not the “one” who will change everything they think is wrong with this country and usher in a new shining era? After all could anyone be? Where will all that affection go? Where will the emotion of the moment travel? It might be something even the Senator should contemplate.

And less you think this is just about Sen. Obama and the current fascination of the political left one only needs to recall the kind of adulation spent on Ronald Reagan during his term and after with some even suggesting his visage be placed on our Mount Rushmore! Even today his memory is cited by the political right and his veneration continues. We all do it, and we all need to be careful as well.

We humans know we need a savior. Instinctually inside of us we, whether we are religious or not, are convinced there must be something, someone, outside of us with the capacity to deliver us from our nagging doubts, our sense of futility, the awareness of our brokenness. But to give that kind of veneration and power to a fallible human of any kind, including clergy, is fraught with peril. Perhaps the rule for we as Christians should be to not give anyone that kind of worship unless and until they die and rise again.

The Archbishop of Catnerbury is beginning to feel a little heat for his remarks on the inevitability of Islamic Sharia law in Britain. It appears all hope is not yet gone. But as I’ve said before perhaps one of the greatest benefits of the rise of radical Islam in the world is that Christians will realize the value of Christian influenced culture on their lives. Sometimes we forget what we’ve got until it’s gone.

Imagine a world ruled by the likes of Osama Bin Laden or any of a hundred would be caliphs and you’ll quickly understand that actually all religions don’t teach the same thing but they do matter and the trajectory of a culture and all who inhabit it often hang in the balance.

Now if we could just get our politicians to wake up and smell the coffee…

The doctors report is in, chronic sinusitis with a deviated septum. Prescription? Levaquin for ten days and then a visit to an ENT to check things out. Thank you Lord.

An interesting article here. People without a messiah will create one because they still have that inherent need. And therein lies a lesson.

One of the things Christians, I believe, have to remember is that politics is always about choosing the best option among a group of persons who are, like us, sinners. Sometimes we get more, sometimes we get less, but we never get perfect, should never ask for it, never expect it, and certainly never place our trust in any person as if they were.

The Archbishop of Canterbury says that implementation of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable”. With that attitude thank goodness he wasn’t serving in the late 1930’s.

It’s sad to see that some in the Church seem to be unable to stand up for the values that underline Christian civilization. Quite frankly we’ve seen so many examples of the harshness and brutality of Islamic Law that I can’t imagine why anyone who could avoid it doesn’t or what possible value or benefit it would be to any society where it is now not present. The larger irony is that many things of value in countries where Sharia Law predominates, from electric lights to airplanes to oil wells, are the result of importing the fruit of predominantly Christian cultures. Can anyone even imagine someone living in traditional Afghanistan inventing television?

Of course we in cultures significantly influenced by Christianity have made mistakes, sometimes terrible ones, and continue to do so (we also have, because of Christianity, the mechanisms of positive change). But does anyone with a shred of common sense think the world should look less like the European / American democracies and more like Saudi Arabia or Iran? Why can’t the Archbishop of Canterbury crawl out of his multi-cultural relativistic mind hole and think that perhaps the reason his country is being flooded with Muslim immigrants is precisely because they’re fleeing such places for something better, the very place he thinks will be improved by importing the ideas that turned those places into cultural rubble centuries ago.

Perhaps its only at the first beheading, sadly perhaps his, that he’ll understand.