Hook, Line, and Sinker

Thinking Faith – The Online Journal of British Jesuits. That is the name of a Jesuit publication. Perhaps I am becoming too cynical but the phrase Thinking Faith just smacks of elitism, n’est–ce pas? Can’t you just see a British Jesuit looking bemusedly over his reading glasses at such simple faith those Catholics now engaged in a Novena to stop the most pro-death candidate from becoming the leader of the formerly free world? In the eyes of the Thinking, we are mouth breathing, knuckle dragging, rosary praying neanderthals. They, the Jesuits, are Thinkers.

Anyway, it is amuses me that those who think of themselves as Thinking are so prone to the snake oil pitch of the huckster from Illinois.

Witness this, a few paragraphs from an article on Obama from the above mentioned thinking man’s journal.

Whoever wins the US election, Barack Obama’s campaign will be earnestly studied years from now. Not for decades has a presidential candidate so electrified politics. Not since 1968 has a campaign been so well organised. And never has one been so well funded by ordinary people donating $5 a time. How does he do it?

There is something new about Obama –something a little hard to get a grip on. It puts some people off him. The “who is he?” question is not just a figleaf for racism; it’s also because Obama doesn’t fit easily into the right-left spectrum. From the start his pitch to America has been precisely that he represents a new kind of politics, one which refuses to slice and dice people into “blues” (Democrats) and “reds” (Republicans), “liberal” and “conservative”. “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States,” as he once declared.

This can look like spin – an attempt to transcend ideology by embracing an asinine “third position” – but in Obama’s case it is authentic. He doesn’t have an ideology so much as a methodology, one shaped by his experience working as a community organiser among the inner-city parishes of Chicago in the 1980s. Here is the key to Obama’s politics. He is the vessel of the hope of ordinary parishioners.

The rest of the article is paean to Obama and community organizing. As it is a self proclaimed Thinking journal, it goes without saying that abortion is never mentioned. Unseemly stuff, that. Best leave that topic to those less intellectually inclined.

This might play to my neanderthal upbringining, but if nothing else this election season. We now have a much clearer picture of who is with us and who is against us. N’est–ce pas?