The varieties of liberal enthusiasm

The Left’s political zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience

— Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas-covering the inauguration was “the honor of our lifetimes,” said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews-by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama “the One.”

It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

The first signs of the spiritual zeal that would eventually play a significant part in Obama’s election came not from Washington or Chicago but from Hollywood. Our moviemakers are adept at measuring the zeitgeist of the nation-of its liberal half, anyway-and are a powerful force in shaping it. And for more than a decade, they’ve been churning out what critics call “black-angel” movies.

These films feature a white protagonist guided to enlightenment by a black character, usually of divine or supernatural origin or, at the very least, in touchwith spiritual experiences that the main character lacks. With the black angel’s help, the white hero finds salvation.

The genre includes, to name just a few, The Legend of Bagger Vance, in which Will Smith-playing a caddie who is really, the film hints, God-restores Matt Damon’s golf game and love life; Bruce Almighty, in which Morgan Freeman, as God, bestows his powers on a manic Jim Carrey; and the awful What Dreams May Come, in which Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a wise soul guiding Robin Williams through the afterlife. Far and away the best of the black-angel filmsis Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile, based on a novel by Stephen King, whose knack for setting his finger on the cultural pulse has made him a multimillionaire. The basso profundo Michael Clarke Duncan plays John Coffey (note the initials), a gigantic black man wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of two little girls in Depression-era Louisiana and sentenced to death; Tom Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a prison guard who discovers that Coffey is not only innocent but also a Christlike miracle worker. Coffey’s laying-on of hands restores a dead mouse to life, cures Edgecomb of a bladder infection, and heals the warden’s wife’s brain cancer. Shortly before he is executed-the jeering of the girls’ anguished parents and the weeping of the prison guards who know the truth recall the account of the Crucifixion in Luke-Coffey has this exchange with a tortured Edgecomb: Edgecomb: Tell me what you want

me to do. You want me to take you

out of here? Just let you run away?

See how far you could get?

Coffey: Why would you do such

a foolish thing?

Edgecomb: On the day of my judg

ment, when I stand before God, and

He asks me why did I-did I kill one

of His true miracles-what am I go

ing to say? That it was my job? . . .

Coffey: You tell God the Father it

was a kindness you done. . . . I want

it to be over and done with. I do. . . .

I’m tired of people being ugly to each

other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel

and hear in the world every day.

The writer or director of a blackangel film recognizes the unspeakable injustices once perpetrated by his country on black people; he wants to be forgiven the sins of his fathers. If he is simply a comedian, he makes Bruce Almighty, casting a black man as God in a sort of lighthearted flattery. If his waters run deeper, he understands that no plum role can atone for the crimes that weigh on him. Instinctively, he realizes what thinkers from Aristotle to Marcel Mauss have known: that whenever a gift is given, the prestige of the giver increases and that of the recipient declines. So he tells a story in which a black man gives the greatest gift of all, suffering-like Jesus in Christian theology-for others’ sins, in fact demanding to suffer, and by demanding, forgiving. White America is pardoned its wrongs, while black America, by pardoning, is elevated to godhood.

Are these movies ultimately condescending to blacks? After all, the white protagonist, the person who will be saved or damned according to his decisions, is invariably more interesting than the serene black angel hovering nearby. Indeed, the condescension, if such it is, is a cinematic version of affirmative action-a denial to blacks of Everyman’s struggle for salvation; a magnanimous extension to them of paradise.

And this brings us to Barack Obama’s liberal support during the campaign, which was decidedly different from the regular media bias that conservatives often complain about. “I haven’t seen a politician get this kind of walk-on-water coverage since Colin Powell a dozen years ago flirted with making a run for the White House,” said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on Meet the Press in February 2007, a day after Obama announced his candidacy. “I mean, it is amazing . . . a guy with all of two years’ experience in the United States Senate getting coverage that ranges from positive to glowing to even gushing.”

“Walk-on-water coverage” was exactly right, and though the media seldom framed their worship quite that explicitly, the exceptions were telling. Here’s San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford on June 6, 2008: Many spiritually advanced

people I know . . . identify Obama

as a Lightworker, that rare kind of

attuned being who has the ability

to lead us not merely to new for

eign policies or health care plans

or whatnot, but who can actually

help usher in a new way of being on

the planet, of relating and connect

ing and engaging with this bizarre

earthly experiment. These kinds of

people actually help us evolve. They

are philosophers and peacemakers

of a very high order, and they speak

not just to reason or emotion, but

to the soul.

San Francisco, you shrug. Consider, then, what Samantha Fennell, formerly an associate publisher of Elle, wrote on the magazine’s website a month later: Barack Obama must be elected

President of the United States. . .

. I have thrown myself into a new

world-one in which fluffy chatter

and frivolous praise are replaced

by a get-to-the-point directness and

disciple-like devotion. It’s intense

and intoxicating. . . . When I attended

my second “Obama Live” fund-raiser

last week at New York City’s Grand

Hyatt, . . . I was on my feet as Senator

Obama entered the room. Fate had

blessed me in this moment. . . . In a

moment of divine intervention, he

saw me, . . . grabbed my hand,

and gave that brilliant smile of

his. I literally said out loud to

the woman next to me who wit

nessed my good fate, “I’ll never

wash this hand again.”

The deifications and hagiologies were particularly overt in the remarks of prominent black figures. Filmmaker Spike Lee, predicting an Obama victory, implicitly compared the candidate with Christ: “You’ll have to measure time by ‘Before Obama’ and ‘After Obama.’ . . . Everything’s going to be affected by this seismic change inthe universe.” Jesse Jackson, Jr. called Obama’s securing the Democratic nomination “so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance.” Louis Farrakhan went one better, according to the website WorldNetDaily: “Barack has captured the youth. . . . That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

To this day, BarackObama.com displays at the top of its homepage the following words (attributed to Obama, though nobody seems to have been able to pinpoint the speech): “I’M ASKING YOU TO BELIEVE. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.” Whether or not the Obama campaign realized it, that demand for faith is an updated echo of innumerable passages in the Gospels: “Everything is possible for him who believes”; “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die”; and so on. If the first component of the Obama creed was faith, though, the second was surely hope-the audacious hope whose name famouslyadorns one of the president’s two autobiographies. We need only add charity to have St. Paul’s three theological virtues.

How can we explain this sudden, brief eruption of messianic fervor into our politics? Perhaps by looking at the religious climate of the country and the world, which have been witnessing a religious revival over the past 30 years. Whether you call this phenomenon the “ revenge of God,” as the French scholar Gilles Kepel does, or “resacralization,” as the sociologists do, the evidence is hard to ignore. In the United States, as everyone knows, the Religious Right has made huge advances since the 1970s. During the same period, what Kepel calls “re-Islamization” movements have appeared in the Middle East and beyond. All over the world, Christianity is growing-in particular, Pentecostalism, a denomination just a century old. To make a long story short, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderfeld’s In Praise of Doubt sees just one geographical exception to a “furiously religious world”-Western and Central Europe.

In America, this revival is reflected in popular culture, too, and not just in black-angel movies. Over the past few decades, a slew of science-fiction movies, from E.T. to the second Star Wars trilogy to Superman Returns, have drawn parts of their plots from the New Testament. Or look at the recent tattoo craze, in which the most popular designs are not the workingclass hearts and arrows of yesteryear but mystical, so-called tribal, patterns.

On what Matthew Arnold famously called the “sea of faith,” then, it may be that a rising tide raises all ships. If reawakened religious feeling can prompt people to inject messiahs into their movies and dyes into their skin, why shouldn’t it prompt them to vote for a black angel? Perhaps we should simply identify Obamaism as one more manifestation of a wider resurgence of spiritual enthusiasm-a manifestation that differs from theothers merely in having a political component-and stop worrying about it.

Yet the political component is of immense importance. If 20th-Century history teaches us anything, it’s that political religions spell trouble. Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism aren’t just called “political religions” by scholars today. In all three cases, observers at the time recognized and worried about the movements’ religious natures. Those natures were no accident; Mussolini, for instance, called hisideology “not only a faith, but a religion that is conquering the laboring masses of the Italian people.”

One reason that observers saw the great totalitarianisms as religious was that each had its idol: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Lenin in Russia, followed by Stalin. Take Grigory Zinoviev’s description of Lenin: “He is really the chosen one of millions. He is the leader by the Grace of God. He is the authentic figure of a leader such as is born once in 500 years.” Stalin’s cult of personality was far more developed and sometimes explicitly idolatrous, as in the poem that addressed the despot as “O Thou mighty one, chief of the peoples, Who callest man to life, Who awakest the earth to fruitfulness.” And in Italy, writes the historian Michael Burleigh, “intellectual sycophants and propagandists characterised [Mussolini] as a prodigy of genius in terms that would not have embarrassed Stalin: messiah, saviour, man of destiny, latterday Caesar, Napoleon, and so forth.”

To point out these words’ uncomfortable similarity to the journalists’praises of Obama is not to equate the throngs who bowed down to totalitarian dictators with even the most worshipful Obamaphiles. But the manner of worship is related. The widespread renaming of villages, schools, and factories after Stalin, for example, finds its modern-day democratic parallel in a rash of schools that have already rechristened themselves after Obama, to say nothing of the hundreds of young sentimentalists who informally adopted the candidate’s middle nameduring the presidential race. Even the Obama campaign’s ubiquitous logo-the letter O framing a rising sun-would not have surprised the scholar Eric Voegelin. In The Political Religions, Voegelin traced rulers who employed the image of the sun-a symbol of “the radiation of power along a hierarchy of rulers and offices that ranges from God at the top down to the subject at the bottom”-from the pharaoh Akhenaton to Louis XIV and eventually to Hitler.

Religion has long been a powerful force in American politics, of course, for good and ill. The difference with the more traditional varieties of religion was the open acknowledgment that they were religious. The First Amendment promised that they could never become established churches; generations’ worth of jurisprudence closely regulated the way they could interact with government. And when a campaigning politician acknowledged forthrightly that he derived a policy from, say, his understanding of the Bible, his potential constituents understood that, however reasonablethe policy might be, what underlay it was faith, not reason. The emerging liberal religions are very different: as emotionally captivating for some, at least for a time, as Christianity or Judaism, but untrammeled by any constitutional amendment; as grounded in faith, but pretending to dwell in the realms of reason and science.

Obama’s speedy fall from godhood since his election has been encouraging, perhaps a sign of America’s traditional reluctance to embrace a Great Leader. But it’s far too early in his administration to assume that the fall will be permanent. And the threat of other charismatic leaders will remain as well-a troubling lesson that we can learn from no less a religious authority than the Bible. A nation that bends the knee once, as the book of Judges bleakly demonstrates, is all too likely to bend it again.

Benjamin A. Plotinsky is the managing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal (www.city-journal.org). This commentary is reprinted with permission from City Journal’s Spring 2010 edition.

Perspective, Pages 73 on 08/01/2010

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