EXPLORING CANAAN: Obama, Marx, and the Source of Hope

Obama, Marx, and the source of hope

Recently, columnist William Kristol of the New York Times wrote an opinion piece on Obama’s comments regarding religion among small-town American voters (Is Obama a Closet Marxist?). Generally speaking, I stay far away from politics—both personally and professionally. Yet Obama’s statements are difficult to avoid, and Kristol’s column deserves notice. Senator Obama made his remarks while speaking to an elitist and far-left wing group of San Francisco socialists at a private fundraiser on April 6^th. The comments surfaced when the Senator was trying to explain why he was having difficulty connecting (i.e. “securing the vote of”) small-town, working-class voters. He said, “It is not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.”

These statements reveal the elitist snobbery of the social architects of our day.. As a self-proclaimed member of the true intelligentsia, Obama “understands” the true reason people cling to faith: they have given up. His word-choice was “bitterness”. The working-class people have become cynical and have lost hope. In Obama’s view, they have (wrongly) turned to faith in God. They only need to be enlightened and realize that he—not God—is the candidate of hope.

What is interesting about Kristol’s column is the correlation he makes between Obama’s comments and statements made by Karl Marx, the father of Communism. In what is perhaps one of his most famous lines, Marx writes: “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Both Marx and Obama believe that religion is a “crutch” (to borrow a crude expression from the former governor of Minnesota). Both hold faith in disdain, and both see religion as ultimately detrimental to true governance and progress. The difference between the two men is in their tactics. Marx’ ideas were used to force the people (volkes) off their religious opium to behold a more enlightened reality. Obama (and more importantly, secular humanists) seek to educate people that true meaning, value, and significance can never be found in a supreme being—but only within culture’s own constructs. It is important to note that the more mainstream humanists do not deny God exists, they simply believe His existence (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.

The world around us cannot understand why we, as believers, look to God as a source for strength and hope. They cringe when we submit our lives to the ethical standards of God, and they revolt when we seek to shape our own society according to those standards. As discerning believers, we must come to recognize that to some degree all political parties see our faith (at best) as a child’s dream from which we must be educated and (at worst) an addicting drug from which we must be rescued.

This makes is all the more important for Christians to boldly live out a hope-filled faith. By our lives, we must demonstrate the singular and focused vision that true hope is only found in the person of Christ. Perhaps they will never believe us, and perhaps they will even seek to silence us. But once we stop living it, then we remove from the world the only hope that exists.