As I watch people embarrassingly fawn over Barack Obama I begin to understand how this can happen.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting Obama is another Hitler. I am merely commenting on the ridiculous Messiah-like attention many Americans are showering the presidential candidate with. Think I’m exaggerating?
The July 27 edition of the Sunday NY Daily News published a story about former Cincinnati Bengals linebacker Reggie Williams, who is trying to recover from multiple operations to replace his right knee. A photo of Williams walking in a leg brace accompanied the article. Written in marker across the straps of the brace is “Obama Heals”.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein jokingly explained what happened when two Obama supporters visited his house: “’When two activists rang my doorbell, I wondered whether they had taken Ecstasy. I was afraid that they might hug me.’"
· In a February 13, 2008 article entitled, “Obama-The Savior Superstar”, Le Monde journalist Corine Lesnes declared, “The United States is a country that prides itself on its insistence on the merits of individualism. Nothing is more embarrassing to this country than these great moments of collective obsession (shared, of course, with Super Bowl frenzy), where every critical faculty appears to have been abandoned in the service of a universal pursuit.
Mark Steyn, in his column for the blog Falling Panda, quotes Ezra Klein of 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."
And let’s not forget Oprah Winfrey who at a December 2007 campaign rally in Iowa referred to Obama as “The One”.
There are many, many other examples. These are just a few.
I suppose this was inevitable given the secular society we’ve become. A secular society will yearn for secular heroes and saviors. For years many have compartmentalized God in their lives—that is those who haven’t outright rejected God as irrelevant or non-existent. We have figuratively pushed God from His throne and installed Man in His place. Whether it has been through worshipping New Age spiritualities that promise to unlock your inner god, or through embracing pseudo-psychologies that preach self-empowerment and self-actualization, our society’s self-worship has risen to levels never before seen in our nation’s history.
And now we have reached a new plateau: American citizens looking to a politician to lead them to the Promised Land.
Unbelievable.
How many times does history need to repeat itself before people realize that salvation is not of this world and that it will not be brought by any human other than he who was both God and man, our Lord Jesus Christ. Americans need to be reacquainted with John’s Gospel:
But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, and because he needed not that any should give testimony of man: for he knew what was in man. (John 2: 24-25)
Donald Tremblay
