Critics on both the left and the right are dismissing President Obama’s recent call for immigration reform, saying he offered nothing new. However, his El Paso speech on Tuesday, and recent events in some states gave hints of a possible winning strategy. Ironically, Obama may claim victory if conservative groups are at the forefront of the change—but reformers will have to scale back their ambitions to make it happen.
John McCain's newest anti-Obama advertisement, "The One," is one of the wackier, more surreal examples of the genre that I have seen. At first, I read it as a strange attempt at humor, another version of the ridiculous ad suggesting that Obama is a superficial celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. When I watched it again, it struck me as another lame McCain attempt to undermine Obama as an uppity, flashy, all-too-charismatic candidate for president. But neither version really works. A gullible television viewer could view the ad and actually come away rather impressed by Obama's ability to connect with ordinary Americans. It's too serious to be funny.
But I have now watched the ad again, this time after reading blogs by two ex-Southerners. According to Maud Newton and Scott McLemee, McCain's ad is not directed toward you and me. It's not directed toward the bitter working-class whites to whom McCain has been pandering, most recently at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota.
Rather it's pitched toward a segment of Republican voters whom McCain desperately needs in November. Both McLemee and Newton "grew up," in McLemee's words, "in the South, not just 'around fundamentalists' but within the shadow of all those 'beasts with seven horns and ten crowns,' and 'baskets of locusts with scorpion tails,' and 'golden cups filled with the abominations of the world' and whatnot described in the apocalyptic books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and St. John." McCain's ad is pitched towards adherents of pre-millenial dispensationalism, a variant of fundamentalist Christianity that is based on a literal reading of the very literary prophetic books of the Bible (especially the Book of Revelation). Pre-millenial dispensationalists predict the imminent return of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but only after a period of trial and tribulation, marked by war, natural disaster, climactic disruptions, and calamity, and the rise of a charismatic leader, a false messiah, the Anti-Christ.
Newton contends that McCain's ad:
is designed to galvinize a very specific group: Evangelical Christians of the End Times, Rapture-Ready variety. It is designed, more to the point, to scare the shit out of these people by insinuating that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. This is a particularly nefarious and crafty argument to make because it is the one context in which all the candidate's strengths -- his smarts, his articulateness, his contagious smile and way with people -- can become evidence against him. All these traits are associated in the Bible with the charismatic, popular, well-spoken man who is supposed to become the leader of the world and bring about the Tribulation.
The theology of the ad is a little confused. If Obama is the Anti-Christ or his enabler, wouldn't his election speed up the coming of the Last Days? Maybe. As McLemee puts it: "If you are waiting for the Rapture, it's not like preventing the rise of the beast with seven horns and ten crowns etc. is a huge priority. (You sort of want to get it all over with, ASAP.)" But then again, the alchemy of religious and political belief is murky and only the truest of true believers spend their time working out all of the many inconsistencies inherent in prophetic theology.
Premonitions of the End of Time might seem wacky to the Rustbelters, urban planners, Midwestern liberals, blogging history graduate students, and new neo-conservatives who make their way to this website. But to the fifty million people who purchased Hal Lindsay's best-selling accounts of the last days, they are real. They are part of a disturbing but widespread political and theological vision of current events. McCain's people know and understand this--and are playing on the hopes and fears of a group of voters whose turnout might well decide the election. It's a strange, strange world out there, but it's one that we have to understand.
Footnote 9:33am: Hal Lindsay himself has weighed in on the Obama campaign. He argues that the Democratic candidate has "prepped the world" for the Antichrist, bearing out McLemee's version of the vision of Obama as the anti-John the Baptist. H/t to Phil.
Yesterday Obama announced his support for continuing, in modified form, the faith-based initiatives of the Bush administration. Progressive religious leaders, like Jim Wallis, have praised Obama's plan. But predictably, it has taken hits from the religious right for his argument that organizations taking federal funds should not be permitted to discriminate on grounds of religion or use the funds to proselytize. And he has also taken flack from staunch advocates of church-state separation who argue that no religious organization should receive federal support, no matter how worthy its work.
Both sides overdraw their case. To the conservatives: the federal government (and all grantmakers, for that matter) have the right to put strings on the funding that they provide. If you are unwilling to accept the strictures in service of your scriptures, then simply don't take the money. During the Bush administration there have been too many religious groups gorging at the public trough for whom service provision is a thinly-veiled cover for conversion or which are pursuing wholly religious-based programs like abstinence-only sex education that do not serve the public good.
But the church-state absolutists go too far in the other direction. Spend anytime in the inner city and you'll find some of the most effective social service provision coming from faith-based organizations. Churches provide lunches, shelters, anti-substance abuse counseling, and assistance to victims of abuse. Many of the counselors and support personnel employed by these programs are part of the communities they serve. They are knowledgeable--and their neighbors trust them. They know how to reach out to the people. Obama's South Side Chicago is full of effective church-based programs, just as is my neighborhood in Philadelphia.
There is a risk that church-based social programs will compete with or supplant more effective governmental programs. Religious groups should not be the sole or primary providers of social services. Most church groups have the will but not the capacity to address social problems as effective as larger-scale organizations and, dare I say, even the government itself. There are many non-faith based nonprofits that do as good or better a job as their religious counterparts--and they should not suffer government favoritism toward religious groups. And to reiterate a point: all private-sector service providers need to be monitored, regulated, and especially evaluated. This is especially true with groups like church-based social service agencies that might, if left unsupervised, be tempted to use federal money inappropriately. Accountability is key. Regulation matters.
One last church-state point. The U.S. government already provides a massive subsidy to churches, one that dwarfs any amount of money that an Obama administration will provide to faith-based initiatives. That is, of course, the U.S. tax code, which exempts religious organizations from paying taxes and which allows private contributions to churches to be tax deductible. This federal tax expenditure channels billions of dollars into proselytizing efforts, creationism, anti-gay and lesbian programs, and religious fanaticism of every variety. Other than the loosely-enforced IRS provision that churches can lose their tax-exempt status if they engage in political campaigning, there are no checks on what, in effect, you and I are subsidizing through our tax policies. This is a far more problematic aspect of church-state relations than well-regulated, carefully monitored, non-discriminatory religious-based social services like those Obama proposes.
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