Despite the title, this post isn’t meant to bash the president-elect in any way. Rather, I’d like to draw attention to the creepy, vaguely idolatrous way in which Barack Obama is being held up as some kind of savior. A prime example of this phenomenon may be found in the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” column today. It’s by Timothy Shriver, and is entitled “Pastor in Chief“:

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, he’ll not only become Commander in Chief. He’ll also become the first ever Pastor in Chief.

We’ve never had a Pastor in Chief, but that’s because we’ve never had a faith moment like this before. Spiritual hunger is everywhere. The fastest growing religious group in America is “spiritual but not religious,” as people from all faith backgrounds strike out on their own in search of ultimate meaning. Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra draw huge crowds and write multiple bestsellers. The megachurches are exploding. The internet offers millions of searchers new ways to find prayers, inspirational readings and rituals. Even The Washington Post has joined with its own entry, On Faith.

With a growing spiritual hunger also comes a need for a community of support and belonging. That’s where President-elect Obama comes in. He already captured the sense of the times by making his campaign about faith and purpose, resisting the politicized debates about the teaching of evolution or the role of prayer in schools. In their place, Obama spoke of issues like overcoming fear of difference and finding common ground in the search for unity.

Putting Obama in the company of New Age snake-oil salesmen like Tolle and Chopra is not exactly the sort of thing that sends a tingle up my leg, and I somehow doubt that the president-elect would be thrilled with it. (And the reference to megachurches doesn’t make sense to me–they are, after all, largely traditional in their belief systems, even if they are less so in the way they package it.) But it is illustrative of the way some of his supporters are thinking.

This is a big shift. For the longest time, the big faith question has been how to deal with the battle between faith and science. Over the last century, as it became increasingly clear that science offered the best explanations for the way the world works, religious believers decided to go on the attack. The battle over evolution theory is the best example of creed pitted against credibility. People of faith spent decades trying to argue for the accuracy of the Bible against the scientific consensus of the entire world. And that argument spilled over into politics, making for little progress and a lot of division.

Those are losing battles in an increasingly irrelevant debate. Times are different, because now we’re living at the dawn of a spiritual age.

You mean this one?

The reasons of the heart form the core of the fastest growing church of today–the church of the heart. And that’s the church that has Barack Obama as its Pastor in Chief. Better than others, he understood that Americans are hungry for ways to connect the longings of their hearts with a larger purpose. He spoke of unity and hope not as platitudes but as ways to live. He awakened believers and non believers alike to the hope within each of them. He led a spiritual surge.

He did it by modeling the qualities of a spiritual leader: he was centered in the midst of conflict, he focused over and over again on how to overcome conflict rather than use it to political advantage, and he exuded respect for others. Perhaps most importantly, he was able to be a leader and a listener at the same time.

Reading stuff like this makes it easy to understand why some derisively referred to Obama as “the Messiah” and “The One” (a reference to the messianic Neo character in The Matrix). If I were the president-elect, I would be doing everything I could to puncture the cult-like mystical nonsense that is being spouted on his behalf. It would only be to his benefit to do so–he can’t possibly meet the expectations of people who think he’s going to bring in the Age of Aquarius.

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