We Have Just Enough Religion to Make Us Hate, but not Enough to Make Us Love

As I wrote earlier today, there are people in this country who are convinced that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that he is involved in some sort of convoluted terror plot to take over the United States. This would be the greatest conspiracy in the history of the world; a man who can hide these undesirable and dangerous connections for the first 47 years of his life, manipulate all of his friends and family into believing he is actually another person, work his way up to the highest office in American government before turning on the people who elected him and imposing some kind of religious domination on an entire culture and country. It is so implausible that it has to be some sort of elaborate fiction.

Guess what? It is. Millions of people have read the Left Behind book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Pundits have pointed out the similarities between the Antichrist character of the books, Nicolae Carpathia, and Obama. The McCain campaign even did an television ad called "The One" depicting images evoking the cover art of the books and featuring an image of a Moses-playing Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer. In the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

It's not hard to see how some Obama haters might be tempted to make the comparison. In the Left Behind books, Carpathia is a junior Senator who speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd prominence after delivering just one major speech. Hmmh. But serious Antichrist theorists don't stop there. Everything from Obama's left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity. One chain e-mail claims that the Antichrist was prophesied to be "A man in his 40s of MUSLIM descent," which would indeed sound ominous if not for the fact that the Book of Revelation was written at least 400 years before the birth of Islam.

Even one of the authors of the Left Behind books says that this is a stretch of the imagination. “I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the Antichrist,” says LaHaye, “but from my reading of scripture, he doesn’t meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the Antichrist will be an American.”

Governor Palin is right when she says "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that...I see America." Obama sees no religion or race in America and that is what makes him the best choice as leader of our country. George Bernard Shaw wrote:

You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’

It's time that we started dreaming of what America could be; it's not time to look back and aspire to what be America once was.