Obama's believers There’s a theological underpinning to what’s going on with the Illinois senator’s campaign. Engaged, well-informed young Americans are being moved to act and follow in what feels like a religious awakening.
Never mind the flap over his "Muslim-sounding" middle name, or the controversy generated by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Over the past several weeks, a far more interesting question about Barack Obama's "true" religion has emerged in the news media's fascination with the "Obamessiah."
Even though, as Newsweek's Eleanor Clift recently observed, his media halo has "tarnished" a bit, pundits and political operatives remain at a loss to explain what Hillary Clinton herself referred to, in a Feb. 26 interview on Pat Robertson's The 700 Club, as the Obama "phenomenon." They are particularly befuddled by the intense involvement of so many young people, many of them university students and first-time voters. They dub them Obamaniacs and Obamabots: "glassy-eyed, brainwashed cult worshippers," who chant "mantra-like" slogans and "swoon with euphoria."
New York Times columnist David Brooks has likened them to Hare-Krishna people and to Moonies — "Soon they'll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings." Joe Klein of Time has dubbed their "mass messianism" to be "just a wee bit creepy." And William Lowther, Washington correspondent for the Telegraph (United Kingdom), reported something "unnervingly akin to the hysteria of a cult, or the fervour of a religious revival" at Obama events.
Picking up on the hysteria theme, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker has dismissed their "New Age glossolalia" as spiritual hunger gone terribly wrong, seduced by Obama's rhetoric, which "drips with hints of resurrection, redemption, second comings." MSNBC's Chris Matthews, going Parker one better, was quoted in Australia's The Age as saying, "I've never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. Obama comes along and he seems to have the answers. This is New Testament."
If it feels like religion …
Actually, Parker and Matthews may, however unwittingly, be onto something here. It has to do with two concepts that are deeply embedded in the Protestant theology that derives from the New Testament. And these concepts go a long way toward accounting for what is going on at Obama rallies.
The first is kairos (in the biblical Greek), which refers to an "opening" in ordinary time, a historical moment when a collective sense of deeply meaningful change is in the air. The other is metanoia (another Greek term), which refers to a radical change of mind or consciousness.
Paul Tillich, the great 20th century German theologian of culture, whose thinking was shaped by the upheaval of World War I and the subsequent rise of Nazism (he emigrated to the USA in 1933), applied these concepts to politics, and to what Obama, echoing Martin Luther King Jr., would call the "fierce urgency of now." Kairos, a transformational moment presenting an opportunity to literally turn things around, is the kind of opening that comes around, at best, only once every generation or two. The last time U.S. politics witnessed such a time was arguably in 1968, during the presidential campaign — tragically cut short — of Robert F. Kennedy.
It might be this spirit — and I use that term intentionally — that Obama's audiences are picking up on. They are, as we hear again and again, enthused, also from the Greek and roughly meaning being "god-filled" or inspired. He is, we also hear repeatedly, charismatic — "charisma" being the term coined by sociologist Max Weber to describe a certain kind of powerfully attractive religious personality.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, whose endorsement of Obama led Clinton backer James Carville to liken him to Judas, put Obama's effect on the crowds he attracts this way: "There's something special about this guy. I've been trying to figure it out, but it's very good."
You don't have to be young to be so powerfully moved. Terry Housholder, publisher of the Fort Wayne, Ind., Daily News, described experiencing "Obama-mania" firsthand at an event in Toledo before the Ohio primary. Housholder likened it to the impact of Bobby Kennedy on his, and my, baby boomer generation.
For those who cannot make it to an actual rally, the Black Eyed Peas' video Yes, We Can has a similarly powerful, cross-generational effect. In it, Obama's campaign slogan is set to music and chanted by several celebrities, intercut with excerpts of Obama's stump speech. A colleague of mine — a political science professor many of whose best friends are Republicans — admits to tearing up every time he sees it. (Yes, every time.)
Nonetheless, Obama's support among younger adults is nothing short of revolutionary. In 30 years of college teaching, I have never seen anything like it. It is truly, to use the student vernacular, awesome. It is not politics as usual. Not only is Obama attracting huge crowds of enthusiastic young people — up to 22,000 at Pennsylvania State University on March 30 — his 37-minute Philadelphia address on race and religion, "A More Perfect Union," has been seen more than 3 million times on YouTube and is a top-shared link among Facebook users.
Politics, religion and me
I am a child of the '60s. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated a week before my high-school graduation, and the Rev. Martin Luther King two months before that. My political consciousness was shaped by the anti-Vietnam War movement, under the leadership of two Roman Catholic priests, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and by the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, when anti-war activists, objecting to politics as usual, chanted, "The whole world is watching."
The world is watching once again. And, for the first time in their young lives, the so-called millennial generation is riding the wave generated by a genuinely inspiring leader, sensing the incipience of a movement.
This isn't to suggest that Obama is a messiah or a God-like figure, of course. Nor does the magnitude of this movement ensure that revolutionary change will necessarily follow what his critics call mere words. But it does suggest that there is something transcendent about any man, or woman, who can move a people to believe for the first time — or once again. You see it in churches on Sundays, and we're seeing it in Obama's rallies today.
Call it enthusiasm, if you will, call it wildly optimistic, exuberantly hopeful. But it is not irrational any more than religion itself is irrational. And his followers are not just carried away by lofty rhetoric. They are actually, increasingly well-informed on the issues. They know what kind of world my boomer generation is bequeathing them. They have every reason not to hope, yet they're audacious enough to try.
If it takes a little bit of what Tillich would have recognized as that good old-time religion to mobilize a generation that up until now has been largely indifferent to politics, I say Amen.
Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of Women's Studies and Religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
Posted at 12:15 AM/ET, April 07, 2008