He writes:
The Republican hatred of Obama has become a cult. It is typically dressed up with the trappings of Christianity, but the cult does not reflect the teachings of that Jewish heretic known as Jesus of Nazareth — unless you believe, as Bachmann appears to, that defeating “Obamacare” is an essential part of the Lord’s master plan for the universe. (Personally, I would have thought that the great soul who reached out to the poor, the sick and the despised would have preferred universal healthcare over a system devoted to swelling the profits of those modern-day money-changers known as insurance companies, but what do I know?) But that is not to say that the version of Christianity embraced by many members of the anti-Obama cult does not play a key role in the movement, in ways we shall presently explore.
The anti-Obama cult is based on an irrational, grossly excessive fear and hatred of something the cult members call “big government” or “socialism,” and an equally irrational worship of something they call “freedom” or “liberty.” The fear and hatred of big government is irrational and excessive because Obama’s innocuous heathcare bill, the passage of which cult members like Bachmann see as the beginning of the end for America, is far less momentous as a piece of “social engineering” than Social Security, Medicare, welfare or progressive taxation.
He continues:
The implosion of right-wing ideology and the persistence of the culture war toxin might have been enough by itself to create the anti-Obama cult, but two other factors also played a role. The first was his race. For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems – hence the “birther” movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.
The second reason involves Christianity. As Michele Bachmann’s speech demonstrated, for many devout right-wing Christians, there is no real difference between politics and religion. If religion is the uppermost thing in one’s life, if Jesus is with one every minute of every day, then it is easy to see how a true believer like Bachmann could come to see preserving her vision of the Republic as a semi-sacred trust, and defeating “Obamacare” as an essential part of that godly mission. Moreover, devoutly literalistic Christians tend to divide the world up into Good and Evil, with the founding dyad of God and the devil lurking in the background; it is not too much of a stretch to say that for many right-wing Christians, Barack Obama is at least of the devil’s party, if not Beelzebub himself. read entire article
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