(Posted 1/09/09 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) As the logic of the godless new world order continues to unfold, as it becomes ever more ubiquitous and uncompromising, as it sheds all alien ideological, spiritual, and cultural elements, as it becomes more and more itself, its mask becomes unglued, revealing its true identity. Godless liberalism has reached a new apotheosis with the election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States. Under the young, handsome, and winsome countenance is the ugly reality of the new world order—man in the place of God, the abomination of desolation, the monistic reign of pure immanentism.

Far from distinguishing and separating the things of man from the things of God, a separation commanded by Our Lord so as to enable their union in Himself, the God-man, immanentism is the absorption of all things into man. Unlike in Christ where the two realms of reality, nature and supernature, are preserved, integrated, and subordinated in perfect, hierarchical harmony—nature serving supernature while remaining nature, with Obama they are both dissolved in an inhuman and ungodly monism. The separation of God and Caesar that Christ commanded and effected is reversed, with the mutilated pieces thrown together into a parody of the Church, a monstrosity that preserves neither the things of God nor the things of man.

As Christopher Ferrara has demonstrated in these pages, modern “liberty” is generously granted in the Regime of Liberty, but only to man, not God. The raison d’être and modus operandi of the new world order state, in both its European and American varieties, is, indeed, the freedom of man . . . from God. Obama’s “religion,” as we shall see, is nothing but the worship of man, and in becoming the President of the United States, he has just become the head of this religion’s church. The “wall of separation” has indeed come down. 

About his religious beliefs, Obama says the following:

I am a Christian. So, I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith. On the other hand, I was born in Hawaii where obviously there are a lot of Eastern influences. I lived in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, between the ages of six and 10. My father was from Kenya, and although he was probably most accurately labeled an agnostic, his father was Muslim. And I’d say, probably, intellectually I’ve drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith. So, I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people (my emphasis).1

Obama claims to be a Christian, yet he “draws” from modern Judaism, predicated, as E. Michael Jones has demonstrated, on the rejection of Christ the Logos. And not only does he draw from Judaism, but as much as he does from Christianity. That he considers Judaism, as well as Eastern religion, Islam and Christianity, equally valid “paths to the same place” is, I think, clear. But what does this mean logically? Translation: “I believe that God became Incarnate in Jesus, that God did not become Incarnate in Jesus; that Mohammad is the definitive revelation of God, and that Mohammad is not the definitive revelation of God. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus is ‘the way, the truth, and the life,’ but as one ‘drawing’ from Judaism and Islam and Orientalism—and as an American—I believe that there are other ways to God. In short, Jesus is, at most, a way.” In light of Obama’s Islamic background, one suspects the influence here of Averroism, the medieval Islamic philosophical position of “double truth,” where a proposition that is “true” in the realm of religion can be false in the realm of philosophy. Obama’s religion appears to be a strange brew of Islamic and Enlightenment relativism and Protestant fideism.

What is attractive about Obama is his seeming intellectual broad-mindedness and spiritual generosity. After all, if believing in one religion provides some truth about some “higher power,” then believing in many religions would provide more truth. For, God must transcend what any particular historical religion could ever capture. To obtain whatever comprehension of this higher power might be possible to humans, it is, thus, necessary to “draw” from as many belief traditions as possible, all the while knowing that none of them, alone or in conjunction, could ever proffer definitive knowledge of God. Of course, God is “bigger” than any religion, even the true one, but this does not preclude God, precisely in His infinite bigness, deigning to empty Himself to become small enough for our needs, to reveal Himself definitively and exclusively, once and for all. Obama, as a zealous member of the all-inclusive church of liberalism, is scandalized, of course, by the scandal of particularity that is Christ. However, for all its apparent generosity and comprehensiveness, Obama’s view is the epitome of narcissism and narrowness. By its own definition, it cannot include any other religious belief than its own, namely, that no one religious belief can claim to be “the truth.” But then, Obama’s own religious belief can not be the truth. Such a belief is not a belief at all, for it can not be evaluated; it defies the law of non-contradiction, the very foundation of all rationality, and the indispensable requirement for adjudicating any assertion in terms of truth and falsity. Obama’s is not so much a false belief as an anti-belief, a parody of belief, a simulacrum of spirituality. Obama believes in nothing, literally.  

Obama again:

I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up a suspicion of dogma. And I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others. I’m a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it’s [sic] best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding. I think that, particularly as somebody who’s now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there’s an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

Again, there is something immediately attractive about Obama’s position here. It expresses a partial truth, namely, that we should be suspicious of our capacity to grasp comprehensively and exhaustively any truth, let alone those bearing upon supernatural reality. That a lack of such subjective suspicion on the part of individuals and nations has led to grave evils is indubitable. This is the legacy of all fanaticisms, whether secular ones like neoconservatism or religious ones like Puritanism. However, Obama conflates a healthy Socratic skepticism regarding one’s grasp of dogma with the hubristic and perfidious skepticism towards the possibility of dogmatic truth per se.

Once again, Obama exposes the inherent irrationality of liberal ideology. To be a priori unwilling to accept the truth of any dogma with certainty is to be certain that no one can be certain of the truth of any dogma. Obama’s apparent intellectual and spiritual humility is thus the precise opposite, for he harbors no suspicion or skepticism as to the possible untruth of his dogmatic belief in the uncertainty of all dogmatic beliefs. For Obama, religious certainty is impossible, and the belief that it is possible has produced and will continue to produce massive evil. However, Obama himself, due to his own religious certainty, is, following his own logic, bound to cause “an enormous amount of damage done around the world.”

The following exchange is, I think, the most revealing of the entire interview:

Do you pray often? Uh, yeah, I guess I do. Its’ not formal, me getting on my knees. I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. I think throughout the day, I’m constantly asking myself questions about what I’m doing, why am I doing it.

Here, Obama first claims to have an ongoing conversation with God. He then elaborates on this conversation by admitting that he constantly asks himself questions about what he is doing. We might interpret such a statement to mean that he is asking himself and God questions in a state of prayerful listening, awaiting God’s answers; but this is, nevertheless, not what Obama says. Obama reveals here, I think, the strange marriage of pantheism and solipsism at the heart of liberalism, where liberty is, as Justice Kennedy pronounced in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”—a godlike prerogative.

Obama on sin:

Do you believe in sin? Yes. What is sin? Being out of alignment with my values. What happens if you have sin in your life? I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.

Of course, hypocrisy is an evil, and this is the partial truth in Obama’s words, but to imply, as Obama does, that it is the only evil is to reduce all of goodness to mere consistency. This is nothing but disguised moral relativism. What if “my” highest moral value were inconsistency? Would not being in “alignment” with this value mean precisely not being in alignment with it? When obedience to objective goodness, discovered, not created, is supplanted by alignment with autonomously manufactured values as the touchstone of virtue; when sin is redefined as a trespass against oneself instead of against God; then there can no longer be any plausible justification for the moral condemnation of hypocrisy, let alone any other moral evil. Indeed, if consistency is the only virtue, then the madman, who, as Chesterton points out has lost everything but his logic, or the psychopath, who is never out of alignment with his values, no matter what suffering it might costs others—and this is why he is a psychopath—becomes the saint. As Jim Kalb puts it:

Since it is choice itself that makes something good, one does not choose things for their goodness but simply because one chooses them. Choices thus become arbitrary, and human actions essentially non-rational. On such a view, the rational component of morality is reduced to the therapeutic task of clarifying choices and the technical task of securing their satisfaction efficiently and equally. . . . It is the outlook of a psychopath.

Sin is, of course, being out of alignment with God’s values, but in pantheistic, solipsistic liberalism, the only God is oneself. Sin is being out of alignment with my values. As we know, Obama rigorously and fanatically supports abortion. It is, apparently, his highest value. As we can see from his words above, for Obama, it would be the greatest sin for him to waver from this value, and it would secure him the most severe punishment. If this isn’t psychopathic, then nothing is.

An honest atheistic denial of God implies, at least logically, the recognition of the possibility of His existence. Rejection of God’s existence requires the acceptance of God’s existence as a logical contrary, with one presupposing the other. And though atheism denies God’s actual existence, it does not deny that, if He did exist, He would, at least, possess something akin to a definite nature, that is, He would be this and not that, with this and that being any two incompatible essences, attributes, qualities, etc. However, in confessing diametrically opposed doctrines about the nature and existence of God, Obama’s piety is infinitely worse than atheism. Asserting that “God is x and God is not x” and “Jesus is the way and Jesus is only a way” is more blasphemous than saying “God is not” and “Jesus is not God.” Unlike atheism, it destroys the very possibility of religious belief, both logically and ontologically. Obama’s religious eclecticism neither affirms nor denies God; nevertheless, it is not agnosticism. Would that it was agnosticism! Obama is a Christian whose brand of Christianity precludes the very possibility of Christianity.

Obama is the high priest, the pope of the church of liberalism. It must be said that the neoconservative regime that preceded Obama was not immune to many of the same errors that Obama espouses, for it too was devoted to remaining in alignment with its “values,” including torture and wars of aggression, hardly values of the one true Church.  Yet strangely, Obama appears no less aligned with these “conservative” values than he is with his own liberal ones, making his regime akin to a sort of synthesis of all Americanist and liberal heresies. Judging from Obama’s recent indication that he would increase troop levels in Afghanistan and leave behind tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines in Iraq, and his “no comment,” that is, wholehearted support of Israel’s “Merry Christmas” murderous assault on innocent Palestinians in Gaza, Obama will be as brutal to innocent Arabs and Muslims as he is to innocent babies. Alignment—at all costs!  

When will American Catholics wake up and realize that the American Founders, particularly Madison and Jefferson, established not a new republic, but a new religion, one in which religious freedom takes the place of religious truth, where the State is designed to be most effective in promoting “peace and prosperity” precisely by saving all men from a Church that dares to save men from themselves. A little over two centuries later, this religion has finally found its Pope, a man who is all things to all people, to all religions, to all Americans, to all people of “hope.” Obama is not the messiah of this religion, for he is too much a man of the left; the antichrist will not conform to the prejudices and idiosyncratic animosities of political partisanship. But perhaps he is its John the Baptist.

 Footnotes

1 Steven Waldman, “Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani,” November 11, 2008, <http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/obamas-interview-with-cathleen.html>, Accessed December 2, 2008.