The Oval Office is godless

Maintaining a Christian worldview throughout presidential contests is crucial. Some come to see their favored candidate as godlike, but Christians know we are all fallen sinners. The four Obama years have exacerbated America’s economic and social problems, but maybe they have inoculated a new generation against political idol worship.

Think back on what the religious left was saying during the 2008 campaign. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mark Morford reported—not sarcastically but reverently—that “Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.” Morford was trying to explain Obama’s “appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world … powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.”

Morford waxed on about the great number of “enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence—not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence.” He then leaped to where no Christian would go: “Spiritually advanced people … identify Obama as a Lightworker … who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

Morford contrasted Obama with George W. Bush, who “laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp.” Bush, it seems, “was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression”—but Bush wasn’t all bad, because he “helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp. We are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.”

Lo, Obama: The “vast amount of positive energy … is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy.” Morford criticized skeptics who called Obama “a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness.” He mocked those who said the apotheosis of Obama was “a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores.”

Nope. None of that. To those who said Obama will disappoint his acolytes, as others who claimed to be above politics have, Morford replied, “Not this time.” Nope: Obama is “the next step.”

Republicans aren’t saying that about Mitt Romney, and few Democrats are saying that anymore about President Obama. The winning candidate will walk into the Oval Office with lowered expectations, and that’s helpful.