I see Obama's charisma lying in the way he represents a collective aspiration in himself and as someone who has a gift for naturally articulating and reflecting back to us a much needed sense of collective future possibility.

That's what a charismatic personality does--it reflects back to the people who are attracted to it something in their collective soul. And people are quite right to be wary of it and the personality cult that comes with it. Hitler reflected the fear and resentment that roiled in the German soul during the Weimar period. But the charismatic personality doesn't have to reflect only the dark aspects in the colllective. It can reflect something more positively aspirational.

Whatever their personal flaws, Jack and Bobby Kennedy had that gift, and it's Obama's gift as well--to reflect back to us what we want to be at our best. It's a gift, and although lots of politicians try, it cannot be imitated without appearing phony. You can talk about hope and change all you want, but unlless you have this gift the words seem hollow--they simply don't resonate, and so the leader does not get the support he needs from the people to effect his agenda. This is why Obama has the potential to be effective in a way that Hillary simply does not. He may not realize this potential, but at least he has it.

We live in a time of rapid change, and we humans don't like the feeling of lost control that comes with that. So we need leaders who can help the more timid among us embrace change rather than to fear it. Obam gets that he's not the one that's going to make change happen, and that we the American people are the ones to do it. Deep down we all want to be better than we are; we aspire to political maturity, and we hate being the fearful children in need of the Republican Big Daddy. But too many Americans have chosen to remain children by default for want of an imagination of what it might be like to be adults. We don't know what political maturity looks like. We certainly haven't been getting it from the spineless, collaborationist Democrats.

But while Obama is not going to make us into a better, more mature citizenry, (he cannot do for us what we must do for ourselves), he can use his charisma and the capital that comes with it to point the way and help us to get focused on the task. He can help us start a long-needed civil conversation to heal the ideological and cultural values rifts. He can help us to understand what's really important and what's trivial. I don't think that's laying too much on him.

Posted at February 16, 2008 1:38 PM in response to Cultus, not Cult: Obama and the Rationality of Civic Religion

McLaren said: Just as religious folk fear being marginalized by secularists, secular folk may fear (with more statistical reason, it should be noted) being marginalized by the religious; just as religious folk fear the negative social consequences of materialism and atheism, nonreligious folk fear the negative social consequences of religiosity.

If we recall a quote that has been attributed to several people - the antidote to bad religion will not be no religion, but better religion.

***

It's astonishing really how difficult it is for reasonably intelligent people even to hear what McLaren, Dionne, and the other responders are saying. I always think of TPM as one of the rare sites where you can read the comments and learn as much there as from the original post. But I guess not when it comes to religion. And I think Brian McLaren put his finger on why in the quote above. The secularist/new atheist is as uninterested in dialog--or even as incapable of it--as the fundamentalist because both sides are thinking with their lizard brains. They both, rightly, fear the extinction of their moribund late modern worldviews.

When I listen to or read the new atheists, it's as if they are thinking in World War I categories even though we've moved into the nuclear age. It's as if because they don't understand their current world or where it is going, they latch onto something they think they understand and which bolsters their sense of identity. It's as if the new atheists need Christian fundamentalists the way 1950s-era conservatives needed communists. The anticommunists needed some focus point to which they could direct their anxieties. They didn't know who they were unless they could define themselves over against what they hated. And they hated with the over the top hate of the cornered animal, their thinking soaked in adrenaline, high on the fear that their very survival was at stake. Oh it felt good, and they were so righteous in their hatred. They were a brotherhood and sisterhood of righteous survivors against the plague that threatened civilization as they knew it.

Well as with the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, or the threat posed now by Islamic fundamentalist terror, the threat posed by the Dobson/Falwell Christianist right is not something to be dismissed as if it were nothing. These are people who have done and will continue to cause a lot of damage, but they are best confronted with poise and prudence, not hysteria. Such reactions just feed the beast, and what it needs, instead, is starving. And the best way to starve it is by refusing to participate in the polarity. And you can do that, I would suggest, by just moving beyond the moribund positivism that defines both fundamentalism and its rationalist materialist twin.

There is life beyond the stale conflict that we've been madly iterating since the Scopes trial. There are interesting developments in religion, and those developments point to a different kind of religious future. But the new atheists would prefer to stay in the comfort zone where they can feel safe in their smug sense of late modern rationalist superiority. Fine, but they are the mirror image of the fundamentalists they love to detest.

Posted at February 16, 2008 10:46 AM in response to Getting the Bigger Story

I agree that the majority of those Americans who think themselves religious are not right wing, But in the political sphere minorities that have a clearly defined agenda, are well organized, and well-funded can dominate discourse. That's the reason for the right-wing Christianist ascendancy since the 70s. So until the Christian majority has an agenda and organizes around it, it will continue to play a secondary role in shaping American religious discourse, especially as it affects developments in the political sphere.

Posted at February 12, 2008 3:54 PM in response to Washington’s God Story—and America’s

Sheesh--

Is anyone out there willing to explore the possibility that their biases about religion are limiting?

Let's assume for argument that there's a lot of bad religion. Let's say most of it is. Does that mean that all religion is bad? Is it a quantitative evaluation or is it a qualitative one. Is most poetry written good or bad. Does it mean because most of it is bad, that there is no possibility of good poetry.

So instead of looking at the worst examples as if they tell the real story, look at the best and try to understand it on its own terms rather than simply reducing it to terms you feel more comfortable with.

I find that most people, especially the so-called new atheists, are fighting the Scopes trial over and over again. And quite frankly that's looking at what's going on through the rear-view mirror. Both that fundamentalist narrative and the Enlightenment rationalist narrative are dead. We're moving into new territory now, and whoever comes up with the most compelling narrative wins. And if you don't think in America that will have a religious or faith dimension to it, you're simply blind to what's happening all around you.

So better to understand what's best in religion and try to encourage its growth, because if there is only the bad to which people will turn as a default, we're all in trouble. Dionne, McLaren and others are good guides if you're interested in understanding the issues of the coming century rather than the ones that dominated the last.

Posted at February 12, 2008 3:30 PM in response to Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over

Semiloon-

Faith is not propositional in the first instance; it is experiential. Faith propositions are to experience what poetry is to experience--it's the same kind of knowledge. To insist on religious truth claims meeting scientific standards is akin to Henry Higgins saying why can't a woman be like a man.

Because there is evidence, just not the kind you like. Religious belief is ultimately rooted in experience--it is subjective experience, but it is experience that resonates with the experience of some of the greatest souls that have existed in the last several millennia who have written and spoken about that experience. If you stand outside the experience, it is understandably difficult to accept it's validity. That's why the experience, aka faith, is called a gift. Some people hear the music and some don't.

Nevertheless, all of us have the capacity to hear if if we're open to it. I have never been to China, but I trust the testimony of those who have been there. Well even the the geography of faith is an interior experience, it is still nevertheless possible to trust the testimony of those who report on it. And as with anything, there are good travel writers and there are poor ones. Don't judge the existence of a place by the descriptions of it that are superficial and cliched. Read the great ones.

Posted at February 12, 2008 1:35 PM in response to Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over

Valdron--

Since I used the word troglodyte in an earlier post, I'll assume you are writing to me. (It helps, by the way, to address the people by name whose comments you are responding to.)

Where the ignorance lies among the "educated" secularists is in the assumption that to be theologically conservative = troglodyte.

Theologically conservative for Catholics and many evangelicals does not equate with rejection of science, and it very often equates with a progressive social agenda. Jim Wallis, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference were or are all left of center on most social issues.

Abortion is the one chronic area of disagreement. But because abortion has been such a litmus test issue concerning one's progressive credentials, they get bunched in with social conservatives with whom they disagree with almost everything else.

Posted at February 11, 2008 8:05 PM in response to Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over

Valdron & Ed

The Dobson religious right isn't going away. Neither is the Aryan Nation nor the Communist Party. The question is how much influence it can have on mainstream politics. If you take away from the Dobson/Fallwell crazies the sane center of believers who have leaned rightward since Reagan, the crazies become impotent.

Evangelicals are far less monolithic than most outsiders think. Many have seen what their support of Bush has meant, and they're not stupid. They see that they've been manipulated, and they are eager to turn to an honest broker who shows that he is able to genuinely respect their concerns and sensibilities, which are not as uniformly troglodytic as they are so often portrayed.

Posted at February 11, 2008 3:35 PM in response to Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over

As an addendum listen to Richard Cizek's interview yesterday on NPR about the changnig politics of evangelicals found here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18854833

Cizek is VP of Governmental Affairs for the Nat'l Assoc. of Evangelicals. He says 40% of evangelicals are up for grabs, and Obama's a very attractive choice for them. He says also that the Republicans he knows want much more to run against Hillary because they know that Obama will break many evangelicals of their Republican habit.

Posted at February 11, 2008 2:40 PM in response to Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over

There are a lot of people on the left who are uncomfortable with Obama's use of religious language, but I think it's precisely his ability to speak credibly and authentically the language of faith that will make it possible for the people that Tom Frank talks about to shift left. There is this group in the malleable middle that were the Reagan Democrats in the eighties, and I think Obama has the ability to effect a similar shift with Obama Republicans.

Is there anything more important for the Democratic Party than bringing this middle group more enthusiastically and solidly into the Dem coalition? It will be 50% +1 and stalemate politics forever until such a thing happens Secular types have got to learn about (the ignorance is astonishing) so they can to embrace and respect what's best in American religiosity. It's not going away. America will never be France or Sweden. And there's plenty going on in American Christianity for them to work with if effecting a progressive agenda is something they are really interested in.

Posted at February 11, 2008 2:00 PM in response to Souled Out: Why The Era of the Religious Right is Over

The military industrial complex got us into the war in Vietnam, and the Democrats of the sixties were deeply implicated with that system.  The great treasonous crime of the McCarthy/McGovern wing of the Democratic Party was to want to develop a policy that was not dictated by it.  The Democrats have paid ever since by being caricatured as soft on defense.  And there are factions within the party now that would be very happy to get back in bed with it.  They tell us that political reality demands it.  The real challenge for a future progressive politics is whether it can be sustained in opposition to the M/I complex.  Is it too late?  Are things too far gone?

Posted at August 18, 2005 8:05 AM in response to Anti-War Imagery and the Iconography of Hate