Politics in the Anti-Christian Age
by Gregory M. Davis
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So what is the real significance of Barack Obama’s victory? Pundits’ fingers and tongues have been flying, of course, scoring the triumph in a variety of ways: the terrible legacy of slavery and racism has been dealt a conclusive blow; the Democratic Party has displaced the Republicans as the party of Middle America; the nation has rejected the pro-war policies of the last seven years; etc., each with its grain of truth. At the same time, shell-shocked Republican fingers are pointing: McCain was too old; it was the financial crisis; it was Bush; it was Iraq; it was Tina Fey. But the real reason that the near-nobody Barack Obama bested the war hero and veteran senator John McCain was that the latter’s campaign was insufficiently messianic. More important than the black or white or Jewish or Hispanic vote, Obama took the messiah vote, that burgeoning segment of the electorate consciously or unconsciously looking for a savior, an ersatz Christ figure, who will deliver them from the oppressive burden of post-Christian existence.
The conventional analyses of Obama’s victory have their place, and one needn’t look far to get one’s fill. But readers of these pages will appreciate that the only true significance to any event—even a presidential election—is to be found in the realm of the eternal. Temporal matters matter because, though temporal, yet are they nonetheless bound up with the eternal. The sparrow does not fall from the sky, nor a hair turn black or white, apart from the providence of the eternal God. The fool saith in his heart there is no God, and the thinking man appreciates that the only true consequences are the eternal ones. If we are nothing more than cleverly arranged amino acids, if the sun will one day die, protons fizzle out, and the whole universe grow cold—then so what about anything? Obama, McCain, war, peace, prosperity, impoverishment, American greatness or decline—who cares? Well, we care, because we sense in all of these things—however tentatively—questions of eternal significance.
With this in mind, we ask again: what is the significance of Barack Obama’s victory? Can we discern its transcendent significance—even if our speculations, made as they are through a glass darkly, must embrace provisionality?
I propose that with president-elect Obama we have taken a significant step toward the end of the world—and not just because a left-winger is likely to make a botch of whatever he touches. By the end of the world we mean the end of human history, which had its beginning with the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. The fall was the beginning of history; the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment—when we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye and the elements burn with fervent heat—will be the conclusion. History as we know it is the story of the separation of man from God through disobedience and the saga of his redemption through divine grace. We do not know when the Master shall return—no man knoweth the day nor hour—but we do have powerful indications from Holy Scripture and Tradition about the general course of history and what its latter days will look like. It is in this realm that we may endeavor to discern the significance of the events of our time.
During the campaign a running joke was the comparison between Obama and Jesus Christ. No, tee-hee, Barack wasn’t born in a manger! That sort of thing. Jokes serve as important political tools. Through jokes, it is possible to broach topics still inaccessible to non-facetious comment. If one causes offence through touching a taboo, one can always beat a retreat by saying that it was only a joke. Over time, insinuating an idea through humor paves the way for eventual, more explicit, acceptance. Jokes about Obama’s messiahship begin the process of intimating the idea that a political figure could actually be the messiah.
False messiahs only appeal to societies that have abandoned the True One, and Obama’s electoral triumph is an indication of how far Christian America has unraveled. Obama is hardly the first politician to cultivate messianic comparisons, and he certainly will not be the last. He is a symptom—albeit a striking one—of a wider disease, namely, that modern democratic politics have become, almost by nature, exercises in false messianism. Candidates, in particular those on the national level, are successful to the degree they are able to imply their saviorship, their capacity to save people from their existential plight. Candidates whose pretence to saviorship is inadequate, such as John McCain, lose. Candidates who eschew pretence to saviorship, such as Ron Paul, haven’t a chance.
You will know them by their fruit, spake the Lord. The fruits of false christs in the past—from Cromwell to Jim Jones—bear out the forces that drove them. The fruits of president Obama have yet to be reaped, but on one score he has already accomplished much. I was astonished during the campaign to hear from many otherwise seriously Christian people their support for a man so extremely pro-abortion. Barack Obama is perhaps the most charming front man the infanticide business has yet to produce, an industry which has claimed the lives of nearly fifty million Americans in the past thirty-five years (and not incidentally with annual revenues approaching a billion dollars). Flanked by his innocent little girls, he looks the young women of our time in the eye, pats their hand, and tells them, with profound feeling and sincerity, “It’s OK to kill your child.” And they, absolved of the guilt of their crime, proceed to do so at the rate of about 3,700 a day.
Obama intimates a change of epochs, from the post-Christian to the anti-Christian age. Different eras and their dominant characteristics invariably run together, but we can attempt a rough chronology. The post-Christian era we may identify as roughly coterminous with the end of World War II and the fall of European Communism at the end of the twentieth century. This post-Christian era was itself the consequence of the age of revolution, or the counter-Christian age, during which Christianity was the avowed enemy. The revolutionary upheavals of this counter-Christian era—from the French Revolution in 1789 through the European apocalypse of 1945—were explicitly against Christianity; they did their level best to expunge as far as possible the world’s greatest inheritance, its Christian tradition. Marxism was the leading ideology of the counter-Christian era, which led to Communism in the east and its antithesis, hyper-individualism, in the west. What secular observers of modern history invariably fail to appreciate, no matter how astute their worldly wisdom, is that the revolutions of the modern era were not merely about dethroning kings, but about dethroning the King of Kings, of stealing His throne and glory for ersatz political entrepreneurs. While the kings have gone, yet the King of Kings remains, and the world revolution proceeds, morphing through different stages to supplant the heavenly with the worldly, the immaculate with the profane, the Creator with the created.
In the wake of the unprecedented physical and moral destruction of the counter-Christian age of revolution was left a spiritual wasteland, i.e., post-Christianity. Nihilism, the hallmark of the post-Christian age, was the logical result of the counter-Christian era’s destructiveness, but nihilism is highly unstable. One can’t believe in nothing—practically or logically—for very long, and so inevitably something must fill the void.
Into the negative spiritual and cultural space of post-Christianity now marches anti-Christianity, an era marked by pretenders to Christ’s throne. By anti-Christian we mean primarily in place of Christianity: the age in which false churches and false saviors set themselves up in place of the True Church and the True Savior. Today’s world has substantially abandoned authentic Christianity, yet the problems Christianity addresses—life, death, sin, salvation—persist even while the answers it provides are no longer socially effective. Thus do we enter the era of anti-Christianity in which salvation is sought in worldly institutions and men, in false churches and false christs, to an ever greater and more explicit degree. It is in this sense that Obama’s historic triumph is both logical and alarming.
The great world-destroying ideologies of the modern era, viz., Communism and National Socialism, however seductive, were too divisive to appeal on a universal level. They possessed a decidedly us-versus-them logic that both made them effective yet limited their reach. Lenin, Hitler, Mao, et al. made their livings excoriating the other, the enemies of their respective revolutions, of saving their societies from the evil machinations of those who would destroy them. In contrast, in the tautologous newspeak of contemporary democratic politics, the only bad guys are unnamed “extremists” and “terrorists” to be smart-bombed into oblivion or sanitized out of public view. Identification of specific enemies (remember “the Japs,” “Gerry,” “Charlie”) is increasingly passé.
Obama manifests modern democracy’s bland universalizing tendency to an unprecedented degree. Two closely related qualities of his campaign stand out: its ability to unite and its indomitable vagueness. Obama is at once everything and nothing: black, white, Asian, other; Christian but maybe Muslim (and a newfound friend of the Jewish State); pro-children and pro-abortion; a socialist who wants to curb spending; a member of the anti-establishment establishment; pro-America yet friends with Amerikkka-haters and terrorists. There’s something there for everyone. We all have a tendency to hear what we want to hear, and the able mass-seducer exploits this principle to the utmost. In order to unite a diverse audience, his message must be of sufficient vagueness so as not to alienate any significant element. Like sodium pentothal, Obama’s infantile message of “hope” and “change” (and salvation?) had the effect of reducing the powers of resistance in his audience and warming their affections for reasons they really could not explain. Recall his Brandenburg Gate speech shortly after his primary victory. 200,000 Germans adoring a black, quasi-Muslim, first-term senator from the Midwest surely represents a breakthrough of some kind, albeit not for the better.
So far, the pretence to messiahship by modern statesmen has been implicit. But what little may separate us from the actual, explicit worship of a man on a popular level may be illustrated by the following thought experiment. Imagine this: during the next few months, the financial crisis grows ever darker, and the question of what our new president will do to save his people grows ever more urgent. Then, during his inaugural address, with the fever-pitch of excitement rippling through the adoring faces, president Obama makes the following statement:
My friends, we have fought the good fight. We have run the good race. We stand now at the beginning of a new era for America and for the world. My brothers and sisters, do not be afraid. I have come to deliver you from the fears of your former darkness. Today, the prophecy is fulfilled in your eyes. Behold your God.
How would the crowd and the nation react? Many would surely recoil at such monstrous blasphemy; many would conclude that America’s first mostly-black president had, on his first day, taken utter leave of his senses; but some—some—would, one strongly suspects, bow down to the man. Think of the armies of giddy volunteers, the starry-eyed graduate students, the black grandmothers persuaded that the ancient curse has finally been lifted. So far fetched? What is the practical definition of worship? When does one cross the line into idolatry? Have some of Obama’s fans already committed sacrilege? Did the Germans under Hitler? The French under Napoleon? Parts of America under Roosevelt, Kennedy—Reagan?
One expects that the messianic sheen will begin to wear off as the Obama administration comes into contact with the realities of governance, but this does not diminish the larger significance of Obama’s victory. False messiahs invariably disappoint, but their attractiveness indicates the extent to which a society that follows them has grown spiritually leprous. False messiahs are only possible in societies that have abandoned the True One. Sarah Palin’s apparently devastating line at the Republican Convention (back when we still had the luxury of speculating about the inadequacies of a McCain administration) that the presidency is not a step on the path to personal fulfillment has been effectively falsified. Actually, Sarah, it is; it is a step on the path to all of our fulfillment through the incarnation of our hopes and dreams in Barack Hussein Obama. Kyrie eleison.
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1 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 11 December 2008:
This is rather over-the-top. Sure Obama has more than his share of giddy groupies, as did Reagan, Kennedy, Goldwater and even at the present time, Sarah Palin. And the US also has its secular gods – conspicuously Lincoln and MLK. But to attribute Obama’s victory to longing for a messiah and to speculate that he will openly assume the anti-Christ role is absurd. Obama won because of the financial/economic crisis. Had this not occurred, McCain would now be president elect – and spiritually the country would be in just as bad shape.
2 Comment by Bill Wilder on 11 December 2008:
Mr. Higdon, I agree whole-heartedly with you. I suspect Obama will prove out to be little more than a shrewd establishment pol. Serious conservatives don’t need to join in the silly hysteria of the “movement conservatives” about Obama (whether or not using abortion as the crutch) since the purpose of such woes and burdens is to do no more than justify support for whomever the GOP props up.
After the destruction of the past 8 years, the notion Obama will be demonstrably worse is dubious at best and is based on little more than speculation about largely meaningless legislative votes. We have more serious things to do than panic over a Chicago pol in the White House. If he proposes bad policies or values, then oppose them. But the idea his election augurs some transformation or epochal event (in the negative) is simply to buy into hype that Obama himself doesn’t seem to buy.
3 Comment by Rob on 11 December 2008:
I have been reading Chronicles since the 1896-1996 William Jennings Bryan-populism issue and have read each issue since the 2000 election issue which had a drawing of Pat Buchanan standing in the way of Bush and Gore. I do not remember anything in Chronicles making me wince as much as this piece by Mr. Davis. The idea that a segment of the public-as depraved and fallen as they are-would bow down and worship President Obama as God is absurd and worthy of the Corner or other parts of the Grand Old Pravda. The 2008 elections were, at best, the making of the next Benjamin Harrison and, at worst, the making of the next Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush. The 2008 elections were not “a significant step toward the end of the world” and the Second Coming and Last Judgment.
4 Comment by Chesterbelloc on 11 December 2008:
@ Kirt
While “no one knows about that day or hour” it hardly seems “over-the-top” to speculate that we are approaching the end of things. True, there have been false messiahs and tribulations before, but there hasn’t been such a systemic, rapid degeneration in the West since Rome. The return of emperor worship is just one of many parallels.
Who really knows where we are headed? Maybe there is a chance to revive the West. Maybe Christendom will be revived outside of the West. Maybe the modern wasteland will endure, and the Christian must quietly cultivate a life apart from it. Maybe Christ is returning. We must prepare for each of these possibilities with confidence in God’s grace.
5 Comment by James Kabala on 11 December 2008:
If Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. were unable to make the psychic leap to actually declaring themselves gods, I need to see at least a smidgen of real evidence before considering the possibility that Obama will do so, especially on his very first day in office. So far I see little hard evidence that hs is much worse than the Clintons.
Also, it most American politicians still feel the need to pretend to be Christian. Look at all the pro-abortion Catholics who profess themselves to be “personally opposed,” or how an atheist organization was able to find only one Congressman willing to publicly proclaim himself a non-believer in God. I can’t see that changing in a month.
6 Comment by Thomas Peter Allen on 11 December 2008:
With apologies to Mr. Higdon, whose own work I very much enjoy, I think Mr. Davis’ piece is hardly “over the top.” The point is not that he necessarily expects Obama to declare himself a god, but that we live in such a depraved, “anti-Christian” world there would be no small number of people who would not balk at his doing so if he did. I certainly believe that to be plausible, even though I think it highly unlikely Obama would be so daring. And why should he be? He is cleaarly not wanting for the adulation of just about everyone not reading this site at present.
Mr. Davis has shown great insight here, I think. Our nation is very much in a spiritual crisis, if for no other reason than many who claim to be Christians concern themselves with temporal matters only, especially in the realms of politics and government. I applaud his emphatic effort to shake us into cognizance of what is happening so we will be as diligent as the true Lord expects and will not be away purchasing lamp oil when He comes.
7 Comment by Thomas Peter Allen on 11 December 2008:
Re: the above, I meant “clearly,” not “cleaarly.”
8 Comment by James Kabala on 11 December 2008:
Please ignore the errant “it” in the first sentence of my second paragraph.
9 Comment by robert on 11 December 2008:
Mr Davis is correct and has every right to assert the position that these are the end times for any Christian to sincerely involve themselves in national politics. Pat Buchanan was the latest voice crying in the desert and his 2% of the vote was confirmation of everything Mr. Davis has written. The remnant of American culture keeps wanting to form other experiments to confirm what should be obvious — Christian culture has become a chain of sparesly populated Islands cut off from the mainland. Bush III, McCain or Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul or any other republican could not have made a dimes worth of difference. In fact McCain was probably the best chance they had at winning power and it is as good for our country that he lost as it is bad that Obama won. That is to say at this point it doesn’t matter who won or lost for those happy few defenders of our Tradition. If this is what Mr. Davis is saying I quite agree, if he saying the gates of hell have now prevailed, then he too is a false prophet.
10 Comment by Gregory M. Davis on 11 December 2008:
Thanks to Thomas Peter Allen for clarifying my intention in writing this piece. I certainly do not think that Obama will proclaim himself God; that was a thought experiment to illustrate a point. I do think that the messianic aura ascribed to him by so many of his devotees indicates a profound spiritual sickness and a further erosion of genuine Christian principles. Many today do continue to call themselves Christians — but who is their Christ? The True Christ or someone else? I would just re-emphasize:
“One expects that the messianic sheen will begin to wear off as the Obama administration comes into contact with the realities of governance, but this does not diminish the larger significance of Obama’s victory. False messiahs invariably disappoint, but their attractiveness indicates the extent to which a society that follows them has grown spiritually leprous.”
Furthermore, the vague, puerile, quality of Obama’s rhetoric in my mind distinguishes him from the more serious, divisive, and destructive Christ-figures of the twentieth century such as Stalin and Hitler, which intimates a change of epochs.
11 Comment by James Kabala on 11 December 2008:
One final point: It is my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) that the anti-Christ will actually be able to summon demonic forces to his aid. If Obama declared himself God and was unable to follow it up with any action, those who do not care about blasphemy or sacrilege would still react with contempt to obvious fraud. If the financial crisis and other problems go away as if by magic, then it would be time to get worried.
Also, Obama is many things, but I don’t think he is stupid. One would have to be stupid to declare oneself a god with 53% of the vote. If his popularity continues to grow by leaps and bounds, again, then would be the time to become worried.
In short, any event of this type will surely not happen on January 20, 2009, or, in my opinion, any time in 2009. I think it is unlikely to happen at all, but certain developments might make it more possible.
12 Comment by Ray Olson on 11 December 2008:
I’ve often said that the president was an elected deity. I was being angry and sarcastic, however, and frankly, I’m dumbfounded that anyone thinks there are those who take the characterization seriously. In fact, I think there aren’t such people.
13 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 11 December 2008:
I’ll worry on the god-making score when Obama appoints his horse, or his puppy, to the Cabinet.
14 Comment by Robert Alpert on 11 December 2008:
Appealing idea and I’ve heard the word “saviour” attached to Mr. O by many goo goo libs but Nah! He is just a Pol. Bought and paid for like the rest.
15 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 11 December 2008:
Coincidentally, I saw a pair of advertisements on a public transportation bus today for a show called Gossip Girl. It featured a large photo of two teen types in the sack and a couple of quotations from the Family Television Council describing the show as “every parent’s worst nightmare” and “mind-blowingly inappropriate” (these were offered as endorsements of the show). We have indeed sunk far.
16 Comment by Geronimo on 11 December 2008:
Not far fetched at all! Lincoln raped the constitution and was deified, practically officially. FDR was tempted to let them elect him for life. After all, American presidents are virtually Caesars, and Roman Caesars were deified post-mortem, and some during life. I can very easily imagine an American president for life. I can imagine Obama of Godlike Power.
17 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 11 December 2008:
Whenever anyone starts talking about “end times,” it’s best to pour yourself a belt of good cognac.
18 Comment by Vance W. McGee on 11 December 2008:
I think that Mr. Davis’ article truly hit the “prophetic note.” Can’t we all agree that Obama’s Man-from-Nowhere-and-Thus-Everywhere persona is very spooky?
I also think that 200,000 Germans hanging on Obama’s every word indicates that some sort of unseen line has been crossed. And the everyday folks out there in Amerika seem to sense that something is wrong; they are buying every AK, AR, and Glock they can get their hands on.
Perhaps we will have four years of Obama and see him fade away like another Gerry Ford or Jimmy Carter. But I can’t recall normal housewives working themselves into an emotional lather over Ford or Carter. Heck, even the comedians are afraid to lampoon Obama.
I’m a Christian, but I’m still worried.
19 Comment by Joel on 11 December 2008:
I note that Michael O’Brien made this same argument here:
http://studiobrien.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=174&Itemid=1
20 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 11 December 2008:
#16 – I’ll join Mr. Salemi for a belt of that cognac. What spooks me is paleo-conservatives suddenly morphing into some kind of end times cult centered around Obama as their anti-Christ figure. Sort of reminds me of the “left behind” Christian Zionists and Nicolai Carpathia or whatever that character’s name was. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect some overlap (bizarre as it may seem) between the CZs and the paleos. It’s not just this theme. On another theme of this forum, posters are urging the stock-piling of weapons for guerrilla warfare. Other forums have similar themes. I get notices in my e-mail of militia organization and training meetings. What indeed is going on?
No question we are in for some hard times. We will have to adjust at least temporarily and maybe for a long time to a lower standard of living. And over-all, that’s good, not bad. It will teach us to live within our means and free tens of millions from debt slavery and slavery to consumer goods. The US global empire may go the way of others, most recently that of the USSR. Again, that’s a good thing. Power corrupts nations, not just individuals.
Many of its inhabitants took the fall of the Roman empire to be the end of the world. It wasn’t, but you could see their point; the Roman empire had lasted a long time. The US global empire is only a little over 50 years old and has been a worse enemy of the best of Western tradition than any other. Its decline, over which BHO will presently preside, will be a great opportunity for us. Hit me with another shot of that cognac.
21 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 11 December 2008:
Gregory, thanks for the post! That’s a lot of meat to chew on. On the infantile sloganeering, I’d say yes to hope and no to change. Change is often the rallying cry of the radicals and the progressives. They know exactly what they want to tear down, and tradition is what must go in order to make way for their “radiant heights of socialism.”
In Virginia the detestable non-Christian ACLU honcho, Kent Willis, is challenging a state law that prohibits wearing political paraphenalia into the polls. Naturally, free-speech is involved. No Virginian had complained until this year, it was a long-standing tradition that simply had to go. More and more traditions will be sliced away from the loaf over a long period of time, but we ought to pray for a critical mass in the loss of liberties to halt the attack. After all, as salt of the Earth, it is the Christians’ obligation to retard corruption.
The Michael Collins Strategy, which has been mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is the next drastic step, and it ought to begin with anti-Christian barristers heading up Dick the Butcher’s list. Or maybe the scuzzy “jounalists” that ginned up the paedophile priest stories.
22 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 11 December 2008:
Furthermore, Jesus the Messiah, swayed large audeinces delivering great oratory like the Sermon on the Mount. He told parables — several of them humorous like the parable of the feast — which were easily committed to memory for passing along to friends and neighbors. With BO we get a stammering rate of twenty percent, albeit delivered in a pentecostal preacher cadence. Overall, he says nothing worth repeating. He’s as much an ace in persiflage as Bubba. The general public will catch on soon enough, and the mockery and scorn will set in along with shoppers’ remorse.
23 Comment by James Kabala on 11 December 2008:
I agree with those who say above that a Christian should always be prepared for the end times. After all, even if the world as a whole does not end soon, you never know when some mischance might bring about the end of your own life. However, I think it is dangerous and futile to openly speculate as to who the Antichrist will be and when he will come. It would have been reasonable to think that Hitler, Stalin, or one of the other twentieth-century monsters would have become the Antichrist, but none of them did, and those who hitched their wagons to such speculations looked foolish. The real thing and the subsequent end of the world may come in our lifetimes, but it may come in five or ten or twenty centuries. If Obama turns out to be a bad but eschatologically unimportant president, this column will look foolish, as foolish as the numerological guessing games of Cotton Mather or William Miller. In the unlikely event that Obama is the Antichrist or a major precursor thereof, Mr. Davis will be vindicated, but will he really have gained anything by his prescience? In my opinion, “watch for ye know not the hour,” but don’t try to predict the hour.
24 Comment by James Kabala on 11 December 2008:
“Or maybe the scuzzy ‘jounalists’ that ginned up the paedophile priest stories.”
It didn’t help that the stories were true. Read Lee Podles’s Sacrilege, if you can stomach it.
25 Comment by george on 11 December 2008:
The way his staff appointments is turning out he looks more like anti-Christ than Christ.
Plus the fact that his major campaign contributers and financial advisors are the modern day Money Changers and the Federal Reserve is the new Solomons Temple.
26 Comment by Joel on 11 December 2008:
People, the author is not claiming Obama is the anti-Christ. He is saying that our culture would worship a man now, given our corruption.
27 Comment by William Barr on 12 December 2008:
“I’ll worry on the god-making score when Obama appoints his horse, or his puppy, to the Cabinet.”
Tom, as opposed to your name, most of the country would prefer to read that the new puppy’s name had been offered to the Senate for confirmation.
No jab, just a fact.
At this point, who needs neocons, or anybody else, to drive home the point that this is No Country for Grumpy Old Men?
28 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 12 December 2008:
@23 James
The ginning up charge is because scarcely a word was said about teacher paedophiles — which are a higher percentage rate than priests, or (oh horrors) paedophile rabbis. If anything escaped local newspapers it rarely made front page news. The names of the reporters were always suspect as well. If you don’t believe me, then check it out. The Catholic church was a target and the reporters, if not atheist, had german names.
And then the vulture lawyers swooped in to peck.
I never claimed that the paedophile priests were innocent, it was merely the way the story was trumpeted.
29 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 12 December 2008:
@26 William
Actually, the majority of people are so illiterate, they’d want to see the puppy’s picture in People magazine.
30 Comment by Thomas Peter Allen on 12 December 2008:
Joel @ 25: Precisely the point I was trying to make with my own comment above, albeit less succinctly.
31 Comment by H.F. Wolff on 12 December 2008:
27Etienne Gervaise:
“…Catholic church was a target and the reporters, if not atheist, had german names…”
With all due respect, could you please be more specific, or do you really wish to impugn the entire German fraction of the American mosaic?
Since the “chosen few” among us have a great proclivity for German-sounding names (no self-respecting German walks around with a name like Goldsmith, Greenberg, Silverberg, or Rosenzweig), perhaps you could narrow your field of “the usual suspects”. Thank you.
H.F. Wolff
32 Comment by The Fronde on 12 December 2008:
@ #19 Kirt Higdon,
I agree this will be a great opportunity for us. It seems that paleos have been “down in Egypt” so long that we no longer know how to think like victors. All the core issues of the cultural Left are about to be discredited over the next 2-4 years, and the Church is going to see a great resurgence in popularity and prestige.
33 Comment by R. McCabe on 12 December 2008:
Mr. Davis, I thought this was one of the better articles I have read at Chronicles. It is apparent to me that people need to reexamine the meaning of “thought experiment.”
Your writing regarding the context of the Obama rise, the past 60 years of Western cultural struggle and the reasons Obama may become the most dangerous president in our history, given our cultural and moral perch, are spot on.
I have friends, good friends, who have become scattered all over this country. Many of those who live in large cities, particularly on the coasts, do indeed put O’Bama (is he not as much irish as kenyan?) on some sort of previously vacant pedestal. Those living in the heartland are more evenly skeptical, but many are far beyond, resorting even to interpreting dreams and claiming there is a spreading sense that something bad is going to happen. The rise in gun sales across this country is not just a reflection of the belief that gun laws might soon tighten, it is also a reflection of the belief that there is a chance – some dream like notion – that all hell might break out soon.
The perversion of principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, whether societal, legal, personal, moral or cultural will always lead to violence and destruction. Some of the problems with the paleocon group are not illustrated in the writings of Mr. Davis but rather in the confidence-less and dull responses to it. O’Bama is the reflection of our times, not the cause of it. And make no mistake, these times are real and dark.
The greatest danger O’Bama poses is that he will be a temporal success.
34 Comment by Homophobic Horse on 12 December 2008:
Obama has played on people’s spiritual yearning’s. I believe.
Change is an aspect of reality, Obama as conflated himself with change to make himself appear inevitable, and his opponents as psychologically deranged. With that in mind enjoining people to accept “Change” is asking them to adopt a psychological that is vaguely expectant, uninvolved and undiscerning – perfect material for a demagogue.
35 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 12 December 2008:
@30 HF
I mean names like Greenbaum, Golstein, Rosenburg etc. I think you catch my drift.
One would hope that newspapers would assign an O’Hara, a Campanella, a Burzynski, or even a Jimenez to cover goings-on in the Catholic church. Perhaps the Sulzbergers would rather avoid the appearance of being sympathetic.
36 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 12 December 2008:
I did not feel any need to research the name of the attorneys.
37 Comment by Arius on 12 December 2008:
Obama didn’t or won’t declare himself a god? What does ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’ mean? Look at it psychologically. What is going on in the mind of a person that would say that? He is saying that he is your redemption! It has been clear to me that white voters have a deep need for redemption for their supposed sins of their race so they pulled the lever for Obama. Of course this is a redemption without any effort and doomed to fail. They have joined with the projection of the messiah onto Obama and he has willingly accepted it being the narcissist that he is. This can only end tragically. Mr Davis is much closer to the truth than you realize.
38 Comment by Arius on 12 December 2008:
“If Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. were unable to make the psychic leap to actually declaring themselves gods, [...]“. From the point of view of the psychology of the unconscious they ‘inducted’ a dark messianic projection onto themselves by terror, mass murder, and indoctrination. It’s even called the cult of the individual. The fact that they didn’t call themselves a god is irrelevant.
“[...] the anti-Christ will actually be able to summon demonic forces to his aid”. Do demons have to look like lizard men with tails? What is ACORN and Obama’s other cadres? Are its members not functioning in a demonic manner? The horrors of the twentieth century should have taught us that that psyche of man harbors demonic forces.
“I’ve often said that the president was an elected deity. I was being angry and sarcastic, however, [...]“. Would you scoff at a psychological characterization of the President as a Great Father? In the psyche that is a deity.
“[US global empire] decline, over which BHO will presently preside, will be a great opportunity for us. Hit me with another shot of that cognac”. I liked Kirt Higdon’s post. Even though he waved away the end times in the article he implicitly acknowledges the historical shift that we are in.
“He is saying that our culture would worship a man now, given our corruption”. This is the great danger of our time which reminds me of the 1930’s.
“O’Bama is the reflection of our times, not the cause of it. And make no mistake, these times are real and dark”. Very insightful post by R. McCabe. He is right to call our time dark. It is normal for a successful politician to reflect the time they are in, but we are in serious trouble when a politician becomes the object of the projection of unconscious forces from the psyche of millions of people.
39 Comment by H.F. Wolff on 12 December 2008:
35Etienne Gervaise:
It is interesting that by and large the authorship of those derogatory news stories about Catholic priests are members of the “chosen few”. Perhaps because of long genetic selection they have a glib tongue and turn of phrase that keeps them just out of reach of libel laws.
“I did not feel any need to research the name of the attorneys.”
Indeed, pointless.
37Arius:
There is one big difference between Hitler and practically all other politician over the last 65 years:
Hitler improved the standard of living of the working man in Germany, and passed laws protecting mothers, children, and animals.
Churchill stated that Hitler had worked wonders in Germany in very few years.
Read a book by Nesta Webster entitled
England and Germany, written prior to WWII.
Most things after 1939 were forced onto Germany by Britain and the USA war mongers. Read Pat Buchanan’s latest book.
H.F. Wolff
40 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 12 December 2008:
#36 – Fifty-five percent of white voters voted for McCain. So much for the need for redemption. And those whites who voted for Obama did so mostly because of the financial/economic crisis which they blamed on Bush or because of the wars which (with much better reason) they blamed on Bush. This leaves a relative handful of groupies, mostly academic liberals, who voted for Obama because they thought he was a messiah or to achieve racial “redemption”. Had Obama been a white democratic candidate, he would have carried over 60% of the total popular vote and may have swept every state.
The change which is actually taking place, which will hopefully lead to the end of a debt-based consumerist economy and the end of the US project of global empire, would be going on if Obama never existed. He’s not even a real player yet other than on the electoral scene. As for him declaring himself a god and a huge number of people falling down to worship him, I’ll cover all bets on that one.
41 Comment by Charlemagne on 12 December 2008:
Great observation Mr. Davis.
The election of 2008 reminds me of none other in my fifty plus years. The election of the Obimite was a time of great elation for many, a transformation, a delivery. I’m still stunned at the response of the delivered. Frankly, I’m concerned. Such automatons.
As for Mother Church: she has a homosexual problem, not a pedophile problem. The John Jay College report spelled that out clearly. According to the foremost authority on this disgusting issue, Dr. Phillip Jenkins, one third of one percent of all males on earth are pedophiles. They exist in all institutions, secular and sacred. The unfortunate reality is that the Bishop hierarchy failed the body. But, we all know the floors of hell are littered with the skulls of bishops.
42 Pingback by Politics in the Anti-Christian Age, Gregory M. Davis « Atitudini fara platitudini on 13 December 2008:
[...] Age, Gregory M. Davis Posted on decembrie 13, 2008 de Ilie Catrinoiu Cititi asta – Politics in the Anti-Christian Age. Despre Obama, istorie, [...]
43 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 13 December 2008:
The crimes of pedophile priests were hyped up for two reasons: the visceral anti-Catholicism of American elites and their lapdog media, and the simple fact that the Catholic Church was perceived to have what lawyers call “deep pockets.” That’s all.
Can you sue a pedophile teacher? Sure. But he isn’t going to have the resources to fork over a big payout.
44 Comment by george on 13 December 2008:
@42Joseph Salemi
But the Vatican helped cover up the scandal even had guidelines on how to cover it up.
Lots of conservative Catholics point to the Vatican 2 conference were traditional Catholicism took a nose dive including Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s dad.
I’ve never fully trust the Catholic Church since the Fatima prophecy to convert Orthodox Christianity which I regard to being somewhat political than spiritually motivated.
Some claimed Virgin Mary apparitions during the Bosnian war another conflict were Orthodoxy was involved.
People have said the Vatican helped ship arms to the KLA and during WW2 to SS Islamists.
Isn’t Zbignew Brezinski a Roman Catholic who lobbied for John Paul 11 to become pope?
Also I would regard it as more political than spiritual like George Bush Sr claiming to be a devote Christian.
Does anyone know anything about Mormonism?
Found a video were they claim Mormons believe Jesus and Lucifer are brothers and that black people were created because they were neutral in the battle between Jesus and Lucifer.
I would image this can’t be true.
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/233.html
45 Comment by Charlemagne on 13 December 2008:
George,
Where’s your evidence? The enemies of the Church have alleged priest sleeping with nuns being condoned by the Vatican to a vast Vatican conspiracy to control world financial markets, etc…etc. ad infinitum.
So Brezinski was baptised Catholic. So was Hitler, Kenndy, Biden and a host of other unsavory cretins. So what? I can claim any association I wish, but do I live accordingly?
I so enjoy this site, but does criticism of the Catholic Church have to arise in every other post?
46 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 13 December 2008:
@43 Charlemagne
Don’t worry about george @42, he can’t spell and thinks Lyndon Larouche is a prophet, and Baron Rees-Mogg is trying to rule the world.
47 Comment by george on 13 December 2008:
@44Charlemagne
Brezinski was baptised Catholic later when it suited his political agenda in Poland.
I’m not saying he is an authentic Catholic.
I don’t think he has even visited the new Pope since his inauguration.
Even Bush and Blair has visited him.
The 1962 Vatican Document on Clergy Sexual Abuse
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8690038/The-1962-Vatican-Document-on-Clergy-Sexual-Abuse
Found it on a news website.
Have no idea if it is genuine.
And no I don’t believe the Jesuits and the Vatican rule the world and I know the Pope was against the Iraq war.
@45Etienne Gervaise
First of all I use Microsoft Word 2003 spell checker UK grammar so you can blame the program.
“Lyndon Larouche is a prophet”
I don’t think he is a prophet but I do think he has good information and background on how to solve the financial crisis or at least prevent it from getting worse.
Who is Baron Rees-Mogg?
48 Comment by Chesterbelloc on 13 December 2008:
I’m curious what people think about the end times. Must there, in fact, be an antichrist? Aren’t the tribulations of modernity enough to bring back Christ? Was T.S. Eliot on to something when he said “not with a bang but a whimper”?
49 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 14 December 2008:
Mr. Davis has made one unimpeachable point. The true aim of revolutionaries is not the overthrow of kings or capitalism but the overthrow of the King of kings.
50 Comment by Jack on 14 December 2008:
“I propose that with president-elect Obama we have taken a significant step toward the end of the world”
The paranoid style in American politics.
51 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 15 December 2008:
#46 – The end times, at least recently, have been much more of an obsession of a certain type of Protestant than of Catholics. Note the “Left Behind” series (a veritable industry), the books of Hal Lindsey and the preaching of such as John Hagee and Pat Robertson. All of these follow approximately the Christian Zionist script – the Jews all return to Israel and rebuild the temple, the anti-Christ takes over the world and establishes a short term peace and is worshipped as a god, the peace breaks down and armies from all directions converge on Meggido for the final free-for-all and then Christ returns and establishes his kingdom on earth. Prior to all these events, true Christians are raptured out of the way so that they don’t have to endure all the unpleasantness. All of this would be an amusing fantasy were it not for the fact that many of the CZs encourage Israeli intransigence and aggression and the ethnic cleansing of any non-Jewish people from the Holy Land.
Catholic end times speculation tends to be less scripted and much more reliant on individual imagination and private revelations, many of the latter lacking even the limited approval the Church gives to some such revelations. I find it rather embarrassing that writers like Mr. Davis and Mr. O’Brien are speculating that Obama might be the anti-Christ. I know they are not positively identifying him as such, but such speculation may lead some unhinged person to take a shot at him. Successful or not, an assassination attempt could lead to some pretty gruesome consequences.
Finally, I would say that speculating on the end of the US global empire or even on the end of the US as a unified country is a bit different than speculating on the end of the world. But for some people, American pride and the indoctrination that the US is unique in all human history, leads to the conflating of imperial decline with the end times.
I hope this is useful to you, Chesterbelloc, and that others will also comment.
52 Comment by robert m. peters on 15 December 2008:
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread. I have learned much and have written nothing since I could not find enough understanding to contribute much of note.
I would agree with Mr. Davis that we are in an anti-Christian/counter-Christian era; in fact, we are in an anti-culture. Culture is the law(not edicts of dictators, oligarchies or majorities), traditions and institutions restraining our compulsions. Anti-culture is the deconstruction of the law, traditions and institutions which restrain our compulsions with the unpurpose of “freeing” the self paradoxically aided and abetted by the edicts of dictators, oligarchies or majorities with the assistance of such fantacies as equality, brotherhood and liberty. Ironically, the “emancipated” selfs which emerge in this anti-culture are not at all Promethean but rather more like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. The words of the Lord of the Universe, the Christ, mock and judge the “selfs” produced in anti-culture as He says, “Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” We lose ourselves in Christ as parts of the cosmic order and moral universe which He has wrought, in relationships to Him, to His institution of family, to His Body and Bride -the Church, and to those commonwealths in which we live out our duties and obligations. Alienated individuals vainly seeking the illusive because-it-does-not-exist autonoumous individual cannot produce the good and the beautiful. Even the anti-culture’s concept of “the common good” is a counterfeit. It does not originate with a cosmic order beyong the individual and the group; it is merely the shadowy aggregate of the quest for compulsions of Gollumesque individuals and the desire of the controlling elites among the individuals to placate the idolatry of self among the masses in their quest for power.
53 Comment by Joseph Salemi on 15 December 2008:
Kirt Higdon @ 49
Every time a crackpot Evangelical opens his mouth about “the end times” or “the coming Apocalypse,” the Israelis are emboldened to build another illegal settlement on the West Bank, or ignore another UN resolution, or just kill Palestinian civilians.
There’s even a lunatic fringe in Israel that wants to tear down the Dome of the Rock in order to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. And our Evangelical nuts are right behind them, cheering on the bulldozers. After all, the rebuilding of the Temple is an “end of time” event, and the Evangelicals are champing at the bit for it.
You want a fast track to World War III? Let this insane symbiotic relationship continue.
54 Comment by Robert on 15 December 2008:
Chesterbelloc, Kirt Higdon
Since I am a Roman Catholic I don’t think any man knows the hour of his own death let alone the death or end of all time. So I have no interest in such speculations except in so far as St. Paul says the judgement is closer today than yesterday. When St. John the Baptist had his disciples to ask Jesus if he was the Christ or if they should look for another, Christ answered by instructing them to tell the Baptist simply what HE was doing. In a tired age such as own it is perhaps helpful to just state the facts — they kill their own children out of the fear of raising them, they load men down with oppressive burdens, they are scared to speak of their religious beliefs or defend their family customs in public, they receive their daily news from strangers believing all they are told by them, they take most of their meals on the move often eating with their bare hands and they prefer to consume much more than they produce. Their idea of reading is about the lives of contemporary actors,gladiators and corrupt politicians. Any man from Mars could see that such a community is living in its end times which is not the same as the end of time.
55 Comment by Chesterbelloc on 16 December 2008:
Thanks for all the input. I certainly don’t want to fuel end times hysteria, however I know I’m not the only one who feels our tired age is ready for dramatic change. In fact, this feeling seems to have become widespread in recent years. In such a time it seems reasonable to think a little about what the end of the world will actually look like. It also seems reasonable to hope that modern man, after trying and discarding every heresy in the last century, will finally return to God in this one. Who would offer much resistance? Obama? He’s nothing more than a product of the times and would fade away like nothing if times changed.
56 Comment by Jonathan Gress on 19 December 2008:
I thought this was an excellent article, especially since Mr Davis chooses to focus on the decline of Christianity, rather than a spiritually impoverished notion of “decline of the West”. Moreover, I should think it would be obvious that Mr Davis does not claim Obama is Antichrist, but rather a type (foreshadowing) of Antichrist (just as earlier revolutionaries like Napoleon or Stalin were not Antichrist, but types of Antichrist).
Since most contributors and readers of this magazine seem to be Christian, I think there should be some serious rethinking of just what is the most significant spiritual aspect of our culture: our Westernism, or our Christianity? I think the preference for Westernism arises from a reluctance to allow important doctrinal differences to divide our ‘common front’.
Firstly, the idea of a spiritually cohesive West papers over the significant differences between Catholics and Protestants (and also between Lutherans and Calvinists). Secondly, it thereby makes it hard to justify the exclusion of the Eastern Orthodox from our group: the exclusion implies, interestingly enough, that the Great Schism was somehow much more significant than the Reformation. This may be trueThirdly, it leaves the place of the Jews unaccounted for: are they Western, and if so, does that mean it is possible to be Western without being Christian? What is Westernism then other than secularism, a cultural identity completely devoid of spiritual identity?
57 Comment by Robert Bruce on 19 December 2008:
I don’t see what the big hubbub is about. Even the American Conservative magazine had a cover that implied this.(Obama hailed as a Savior type) I am sorry, but this guy has even Germans flocking like mad groupies ,ala the Beatles, for him. Sure he is just another elitist prop, but he is the one a lot of people are putting their hope into, not Jesus Christ. He may or may not act this out, that isn’t the point people!!! There is a sad disconnect here in that folks are no longer putting their hope in Christ, but some clown that came out of nowhere, and can’t even produce a birth certificate. I don’t read any real end times stuff in here, just that we have indeed reached a different phase in the battle of secularism vs Christianity. Look at who Obama picked for his swearing in invocation, Rick “Elmer Gantry, Show me the Money” Warren. Christianity itself has become a corporatist joke, with most of its adherents nothing more than useful dupes for the neo Marxists and their banker bosses.
58 Comment by Allen Wilson on 22 December 2008:
Mr Gress, you have a point to a degree. The West existed before Christianity existed, and Jews who have been in Europe for centuries can be considered Westerners. Even so, the Christianisation of the West didn’t make it stop being Western any more than the ‘Buddhisation’ and then re-Hinduisation of India made it any less Indian.
Even so, Christianity is at the heart of the West and without it the West dies, and it’s no coincidence that the war on Christianity is also a war on the West’s cultural heritage including – and especially – the Classical heritage.
Islam destroys all civilisations it touches and leaves behind a husk of the former culture. So too do modern Liberalism and cultural Marxism. The West cannot remain the West if either of these two evil cults win out, any more than it could do if the ridiculous and socially subversive Jehovie cult became the dominant cult. Imagine how ridiculous the West would be under the rule of Jehovies. Eventually, it would become as bad as Islam.
The false Messiahnism of the Obama cult – in – embryo is scary, and brings to my mind something more akin to the scarier aspects of ancient middle eastern pagan idol worship than the paganism of Greece or Rome. It may also turn out to have murderous aspects to it, or if not, something may well succeed it which will turn out to be murderous. It’s as if the whole country is about to self – destruct in a frenzy of insanity and stupidity.
59 Comment by Bob Johnson on 25 December 2008:
“You want a fast track to World War III? Let this insane symbiotic relationship continue.”
Well put, Joe Salemi.
What I could never understand about the element of the Republican Party who actually thought Bush’s love affair with Ariel Sharon was a reason to support him (Hagee who propped up the neocon McCain being one example, and Robertson who tried propping up the neocon Guilani being another), is why they think the good lord needs their help to set off WWIII?
Now if someone I cared about needed help, I’d try to help them myself, as opposed to taking the quietistic and cowardly view that it should just be left in the hands of the lord.
But on the other hand, if someone happened to believe in the theological need for WWIII, why not just leave it in the hands of the lord?
That way you’ll avoid accidentaly making WWIII happen, destroying the human race in the process, and then it turns out god didn’t want you to do it anyway.
The answer, of course, is the need some of the weakest leaders in this country feel to kowtow to Jewish Power.
Huckabee, to his credit I think, didn’t let a nest of Jewish Vipers infest his campaign.
He ended up losing anyway thanks to the mass media’s pro-McCain agenda, but if he had won the nomination his wise decision to discriminate against the neocons would have aided him greatly in the general.
60 Comment by Bob Johnson on 25 December 2008:
>Every time a crackpot Evangelical opens his mouth about “the end times” or “the coming Apocalypse,” the Israelis are emboldened to build another illegal settlement on the West Bank, or ignore another UN resolution, or just kill Palestinian civilians.<
Damn straight, Mr. Salemi.
The good thing though is that if the crackpots you speak of get their wish vis a vis Middle Eastern War, you and me can have a good laugh afterwards about how the end times didn’t end up coming after the battle after all.