Aristotle defined man as a political animal.  That is, to Aristotle, one of the defining characteristics of humanity is its drive and capacity to come together to form complex, ordered hierarchies which govern complex, ordered societies.  In college one of my professors taught that, deeper even than humanity’s drive to create social and political order was its urge to worship.  People, my professor said, are by nature religious animals.  That is, they are driven to identify, appease, or praise some kind of supernatural force.  Archaeology and anthropology seem to confirm my professor’s theory repeatedly.  As long as genus Homo has existed, it seems to have been religious.  (This increasingly appears to be a fact.  The reasons behind this fact are, of course, open to interpretation.)I was reminded of this side of human nature earlier last week, after looking through several videos and blogs in support of Barack Obama.

My wife and I live in South Korea.  Living overseas creates an information buffer.  Unless we constantly stay on top of all the news online we’re usually only aware of major headlines. The general atmosphere of the US presidential campaign is something we’re fairly separated from here.  Because of this, I’ve missed a lot of the hype surrounding the Obama campaign.  While I’d heard a lot about it, I hadn’t looked at much of it until last week.  What I saw disturbed me.

I started off by watching a music video called “My American Prayer“.  The not-so-subtle message of this video is that now is the time we can change the world, if only we vote for Barack Obama.  Several celebrities make this statement in different forms over and over again for four and a half minutes, while a woman sings, “This is my American prayer!” in the background.

I read quasi-hagiographical accounts of Obama’s speeches:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.

I read other accounts that suggest that Obama has superhuman powers of inspiration.  And I read the words of supporters close to Obama (in this case, his wife Michelle) speaking of him in terms normally reserved for a deity:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Now, it’s clear that Barack Obama is inspiring.  I see nothing wrong with a politician being inspiring.  In fact, I think it’s better for a leader if he is inspiring.  But there’s inspiring, and then there’s being the center of what increasingly appears to be the most intense messianic personality cult in America in living memory.  Perhaps most surprising is the political affiliation of most of those devoted to Barack Obama: they are Democrats.  Such devotional behavior among modern Democratic voters is unusual, to say the least, and can be fairly interpreted as evidence that humanity is by nature religious. Allow me to explain.

The Democratic Party today is an overwhelmingly secular party.  While a large number of Democrats are either themselves religious or have religious sympathies, a larger number do not.  They at best express discomfort with, and at worst regularly ridicule, other people singing hymns of praise and supplication to God in church. Over the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has fairly well stripped itself of the substantive forms of worship which have been ubiquitous in American politics over the last 200 years.  This decision among Democrats to cut themselves off from both deeply rooted American tradition and their own natures has, I believe, built up in them an urge for some kind of transcendent force to identify, appease, or worship.  This urge has led many of them to completely and totally devote themselves to Barack Obama in an almost unprecedented fashion.  These same people, many of whom are either antagonistic or apathetic towards religion, use essentially religious language to praise Barack Obama and explain why he must be president.

This, to put it mildly, is not good.  Leave aside for the moment the fact that looking for salvation through political means is a chimera — that it has only brought heartache, disappointment and destruction in the past.  No person — no matter how amazing or charismatic — is worthy of worship.  The only proper object of worship is divinity, not humanity.  Barack Obama is just a man, yet a disturbing number of his supporters seem to willfully disregard that fact.  An alarmingly large number of then don’t know his actual positions, they only know about his background and that he represents “hope” and “change.”  For them, Obama’s appeal ultimately comes down to him, not to what he will do once he becomes president (his policies), or even to what he wants to do (his political views).  Obama’s message for them is “Trust me.  I will make everything better.”  It’s a message that makes sense if he’s a god talking to his followers, or if he’s a parent talking to his children.  Otherwise it’s not something anyone should feel comfortable with.