On and Off the Bike Path
I caught the last few minutes of Sean Hannity’s radio interview today with James Dobson, a well-known fundamentalist Christian preacher. Dobson has picked a fight with Obama over some passages from the Bible, and was wondering aloud to Hannity about Obama’s bona fides. I neither know nor care about the merits of the argument since I don’t believe in hyperliteralism as a philosophy, but what I do care about is whether this is the way Dobson will take to opposing Obama in November. Because, if it is, I think it’s a valuable rationalization that Dobson can make that will ultimately benefit McCain. Dobson doesn’t have to like McCain, but if he can make the kinds of theological arguments that will draw out Obama’s many weaknesses on the issue of The Church, it will help the others who think like him (i.e., dislike McCain) to vote against Obama, anyway. Surely they won’t stand idly by while someone with Obama’s potential for causing such great and lasting harm moves ever closer to the Presidency. These people need to scrounge up enough Biblical anger to paint this man as something malevolent and beyond the pale. The Christian Right needs to supernaturalize Obama in a way his acolytes haven’t even considered yet.
I don’t think Obama is a Christian in any meaningful sense. Any man who would abandon his spiritual adviser and mentor —and then the only church he ever knew— for such obviously false reasons isn’t really a Christian, but a user of his ecclesiastical community and a hypocrite. When I left my mother’s church as a young boy and professed my atheism, you may be sure that I damned well had a reason.
So why is Obama getting a pass on this? Maybe America is too secular to care. Maybe Obama’s allies in Big Media don’t want to scrutinize his religious associations. Maybe the church Obama belonged to is not amenable to race-neutral deconstructions. But, as Dobson and other unapologetically Christian Christians continue building an alternative —theological— basis for rallying the reluctant fundamentalist base to McCain’s side, I simply smile and hope for the best.
