Pensees: Sensibility: The Christian Pastor in the Age of Obama-mania and Why Evangelicals Hope in Obama

Sensibility: The Christian Pastor in the Age of Obama-mania and Why Evangelicals Hope in Obama

The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader. The leader is driven by the desire for power, while the organizer is driven by the desire to create. The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach – to create, to be a ‘good creator,’ to play God. ~ Saul D. Alinsky, Rules For Radicals, p. 61.

What would it have been like to be an evangelical pastor during the French Revolution? The godly pastor in the late 18th century would have had to combat what historians refer to as the “Cult of Sensibility” much as the 21st century pastor is obliged to do more than any of his predecessors since the French Revolution. Nothing illustrates this more than the giddy affair American Evangelicals are having with a “community organizer.”

The American Right has failed to educate grassroots America on what a “community organizer” is. By opting for establishmentarian snobbery that publicly mocked the title at the Republican Convention, they have lost their best opportunity to explain to the American public the difference between liberal ideology and traditional values. Over and over again on Fox News they derisively asked, “What does a community organizer do?” In the meantime, conservatives and centrists alike were being blindsided by a beautifully orchestrated grassroots organization that is successful, in part, because of the neo-conservative snobbery on the right that has imbibed liberal ethos toward its own base. Assuming people are too stupid to think, they don’t bother to educate. They just ask you to mock who they mock. So millions of Americans sneered, “What is a community organizer?”

But “organizer” means something. And “change,” the word that we have seen millions of times over in countless pictures of Barack Obama before his throngs, is not just a meaningless little word to dupe disillusioned twenty-somethings. Change is an ideology. It is specifically referred to as such by Saul Alinsky, Senator Barack Obama’s hero. “Organizer” is Alinsky’s word as well. It’s his word for “revolutionist” (p.46). Barack Obama taught Alinsky’s philosophy, imbibed it, and fleshed it out in Chicago, claiming, according to a 2007 Washington Times article, that those years taught him more about his “Christian faith” than anything else.

But does the practice of Alinsky’s principles mesh with a Christian worldview and, more importantly, does it really matter to Evangelicals? Apparently, many Evangelicals don’t care. How is this possible?

There are many reasons, but for starters I think that there are two major factors that are contributing to the mass conversion of many Evangelicals toward a leftist cause. The first reason is the zeitgeist of the day in our American society is very much like that which dominated society in France just prior to the French Revolution. The second is that Barack Obama is an outstanding organizer. He has lived by Alinsky’s rules, has succeeded, and worse, will continue to live by them.

“An organizer,” said Alinsky, “working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist” (Rules, p. 10, emphasis his). The organizer’s (“or revolutionist’s”) job is to “inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and a desire for change and to identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose” (p. 103, emphasis mine). “Hope” and “change.” Sound familiar?

I want to blog more in the next few days about Alinsky’s principles of means and ends which are clearly the same as the Obama campaign and clearly amoral, but suffice it to say for now that an organizer is a revolutionist with an ideology of change. Certainly change is good and often necessary, but I want to ask all my Evangelical friends who are voting for Obama if they want change so badly they are willing to blindly embrace – not just change, but an ideology of change.

Some things should never change. But Americans want change even if they don’t know what it is. They want to jump out of the frying pan even if it is into the fire. They are willing to gamble their society by placing hope in an ideology of change that, by its own words, is not grounded in fixed truth, but is relativist. It is necessarily relativist because ultimately truth does not change. Thousands of Americans are sacrificing reason for feeling because feeling is less fettered by unchanging truth.

Perhaps the large contingency of “Evangelicals for Obama” illustrates this better than any other segment of society that is caught up in the wave of Obama-mania. Evangelicals pay lip service to unchanging truth, but are embracing an ideology that depends on the notion that truth is relative. This is because most Evangelicals in America are actually not Evangelical in the biblical sense. They don’t think that what Barack Obama believes will affect how he governs (assuming they have actually thought long enough to question what he believes) because what they say they believe doesn’t affect how they live. As the left-leaning sociologist, Douglas Porpora observed, “I have come to think of it as one of the mysteries at the turn of the millennium that many people not only go on believing in God but go on attaching importance to that belief without its having moral relevance to their lives or giving their lives moral direction” (Landscapes of the Soul, p. 16).

In other words, they say they believe; it is just that what they say they believe doesn’t affect them. And they cannot even begin to comprehend the notion that what a man believes actually steers him. They don’t believe in belief. But belief does affect a man; that is, what a man really believes affects him. And though Barack Obama may say he believes in the Christian faith, what is certain is that he really believes in Alinsky’s philosophy. Alinksy’s philosophy defiantly scorns absolute truth.

Next week Evangelicals will, in large numbers, pull the lever for a man who is more ideologically liberated from the moorings of moral law and absolute truth than any other candidate in American history. And I speak of more than just his pro-abortion and pro-gay commitments.

France in the late 18th century had a higher literacy rate than the United States has today. But France was under the spell of Sensibility. The “cult of Sensibility” emphasized feelings, the “natural” over the “tutored,” and had imbibed on a popular level the epistemology (the study of how we get knowledge) from influential philosophers like Hume (Scottish) and Rousseau (Swiss). Novels were the new rage in England and entertainment via print and theater facilitated by better technology and increasing daring began to dominate the collective mind of “the People.” Soon “emotional truth” (sincerity) became more effective in the minds of the French than truth. In fact, they truly believed that “emotional truth” was the only kind of truth.

Sensibility had its own vocabulary used so profligately that one wonders how they could not have immediately waned. Nonetheless, words like tender, drunk with pleasure, sensible, benevolent, generous, and so forth became the daily rhetoric of the French people insomuch that the more eloquent a speaker was, the more he was loved. What he said actually bore little importance.

Eloquence and the power to incite deep feelings became so important to survival in the ever-volatile politics of late 18th century France that it was common knowledge to all leaders that sometimes their very lives depended on their ability to sway a crowd, possibly an audience of onlookers at their trial, by their ability to speak. Public diction was public power, said Schama, and then brilliantly opines, “it does not seem too much to say that it was oratory that created ‘The People,’ not vice versa.”

In an insightful and disturbing analysis of Obama’s politics of crowds published today and how Obama’s crowds remind him of the frenzied masses in the Middle East who hailed their redeemers one right after another, Fouad Ajami identifies Barack Obama’s most distinguishing quality: “The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish.”

Exactly. And Evangelicals are projecting on Obama what they wish with alarming naïveté. Robespierre (of French Revolution notoriety) famously stated that politics was nothing more than public morality. And history has shown that the public morality of Robespierre’s France was nothing more than public feeling. It was, indeed, the “secular religion of Sensibility” (Schama). (Parenthetically, his followers adored Robespierre as the “Incorruptible Lawyer.” You make the analogy.)

I would argue that the mania for Obama is very much like the mania so typical of France when it drunkenly reeled into the first of five republics without any anchor in a higher law that was alien to the nature of man. It was the era of inchoate socialism and the beginning of two centuries of intolerant mediocrity, weak men, and one of the world’s weakest Christian societies.

France became “drunk” with infatuation over anything and anyone that could appeal to the feelings of le publique. Men who became symbols of the “common man,’ but who were clearly uncommon in genius were worshipped, almost literally. Benjamin Franklin was treated like a god. Marguerite Gérard painted the well-known “Au Génie de Franklin” which portrays him god-like in the clouds with a bolt of lightening at his disposition. Natural power was under the authority of natural man.

Even words became idolized. Thematic words with subjective appeal like freedom, equality, brotherhood (or “change” and “hope”) were immortalized in art. Thus, Delacroix gave the world “Liberty Leading the People,” the bare-breasted woman waving the tricolore as the masses follow her charge, a painting which would become world famous if only for being on the face of French currency for many years. Re-name her and call the painting, “Change Leading the People.”

Why are Evangelical Christians so infatuated? In another article from my friend, Jim Brown, that also appeared today Dave Kinnaman, president of the Barna group, is cited on this interesting phenomenon.

“People in their 20s or 30s who are born-again Christian are more likely to support Senator Obama than Senator McCain, compared to people who are older born-again Christians, who are more likely to support the Arizona senator,” he explains. “So, when you look at it, it’s a pretty complex set of reasons, and each person comes to this voting decision with their own unique sensibility, but what’s interesting is the Christian community, compared to previous elections, is more open to this Democratic candidate than we’ve seen in at least the last couple national elections.”

The phrase that alarms me is “their own unique sensibility.” If each person’s “unique sensibility” is the guiding light for voters then what logically must happen is the dissolution of individuality into a mass of disparate backgrounds and worldviews brought together by common feeling. Change, hope, freedom, prosperity, happiness, brotherhood, peace are all themes that arouse a common feeling of yearning in the heart of every human being even though no definition of any of these terms is offered. The crowds flock to the feeling the words evoke and deliberately avoid the meaning of those words.

In the years preceding the Terror of the French Revolution it was the lawyer-orator that was most able to “articulate for the public the ‘springs of the human heart’” (Schama) that was the man most likely to ascend to power. But the “springs of the human heart” are no reliable source of truth. As one writer said, humans are “inveterate meaning-mongers” and eventually they will begin to ask themselves if there are not, in fact, fixed definitions for these words that inspire so much hope and desire. As Christians we too are invigorated by the theme of change. “One day we shall all be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51). Hope is a word with substantive meaning to us, but it is a hope that is not seen. “Now hope that is seen is not hope” (Romans 8:24).

Barack Obama is a lawyer-orator that has understood that crowds are power. He is nearly the perfect representation of Alinsky’s “perfect organizer” described in Alinsky’s book, communication being the most important quality. A great communicator is just as effective with thoughtless, entertainment-saturated throngs now as it was during the French Revolution. Only the French two hundred years ago were more literate than Americans today.

While France adored men, unbeknownst to them God was graciously awakening the English-speaking world through the powerful preaching of God’s Word. It makes one wonder what we are missing in 2008? Could it be that while we watch our country swoon after a man somewhere in another part of this world God is awakening entire countries with hope and change, the hope and change that come from the unadulterated proclamation of the absolute truths of God’s Word?

I don’t know what the French pastors did. It is very difficult to find any records of Gospel-believing people in France during the French Revolution. What we do know is that the biblical pastor must steadfastly preach a Gospel that he actually believes in and perhaps those who are around him will see that what he believes actually affects him, thereby assuming that what others believe affects what they do as well. Evangelicals are flocking to Obama, an organizer who’s known ideology compels him to “play God” (Alinsky) because they want change and hope. What they say they believe, and what their parents who gave their lives to the pursuit of the American Dream said they believed, hasn’t given them any hope of change at all. They don’t believe belief matters. When they are presented with the facts of Alinsky’s ideology they will just shrug.

So what? My Christian parents have lived all their lives saying they believe in a Heavenly City but they have made all their decisions as if the American Dream was the ultimate goal. What they said they believed didn’t affect them too much. Why should liberal ideology affect Barack Obama? Besides, when he talks about change, I just feel like this is the real deal!

The national crisis is a soul crisis.